The Possibilities: A Novel (19 page)

Chapter
16

The plank flooring in Pete’s Antiques is soft; the shop, warm. It smells like ancestors instead of hot dogs. I lean over to look into a huge black bowl mounted on faded, red wooden legs. Dead people once owned everything here. Gave birth on the beds, had sex on the settees, ate from the spoons, banged the gongs.

“A cauldron,” someone says, startling me. I turn to see an older man, perhaps Pete. He runs his finger along the bumpy rim of the bowl.

“Some things beg to be touched,” he says, and I wonder how other people respond to that because I’m not sure how to. “This came from Manitou Springs.” He has an animated voice with a sardonic lilt that infuses his words with air quotes. “Manitou is the witch capital of Colorado.”

“Yes,” I say, because saying “I know” seems obnoxious.

“Do holler at me if you need my assistance.” He walks away, holding his hands in an awkward prayer position behind him. I go to the back of the shop where the larger furniture is displayed. There aren’t any customers back here.

I head to the wooden rocking chair but change my direction when I see the bed—a four-poster mahogany. There’s a sign that says Please Touch and so I get onto it, letting my legs hang over the edge. I run my hand down one of the posts and look at the smooth board, the eddies in the wood. I had a bed like this when I was a girl and wonder what happened to it. I’d lie back and stargaze at my own arboreal galaxy in the canopy, writing poems and listening to the Rolling Stones, ruing my life without a mother, but since I couldn’t completely remember her, I think I sort of relished the ruing itself. I think of Seth now, the senior to my sophomore. I would lie in my canopy bed and pine for him. Some things beg to be touched.

When I was that age, speakers at assemblies would always talk about all the pressure we’d soon face or were facing—pressure to do drugs, to have sex—but when I turned sixteen and was dying to smoke pot and have sex, I found the search for both to be impossible.

Then there was Seth. Then there was a party. On the top of what’s now Peak 7, construction workers had cleared a small amphitheater of space, behind it fragrant trees spaced widely apart, fallen branches serving as benches. We all drove up on the access road, built a bonfire, drank beers and wine coolers. Further down from the clearing was the Igloo, which was really an old wooden shack, a crawl space built for skiers to warm up. It may still be there.

Seth asked if I wanted to go in with him to talk.

“Sure,” I said, knowing exactly what was going to happen, or at least knowing what I wanted to happen: I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to crawl out of there with him, with everyone looking at our smug expressions, wondering. He had been flirting with my friend, Amber, but something told me he was drawn to me, something in his flitting, suggestive gaze told me we were going to put our arms around each other, if not that night then the next, or the next, or possibly, hopefully, the next.

I think I was enamored with him just because he paid attention. He’d look at me, almost luridly, which had to be the most flattering thing in the world. I’d feign annoyance, but my heart would race. He was beautiful, and you wanted to be around him because he’d make you beautiful too. He was like Billy in some ways, the way he could make me feel, though Billy was always kind.

That night I would kiss Seth. I would let him feel my breasts. And he did kiss me. For a long time. And he did feel my breasts, for a long time too. At one point he squeezed my nipple and it startled me. “Ouch,” I said.

We stopped kissing then, and he drank from his beer. From the Igloo I could see light from the bonfire through the wooden slats. He put his hand on my leg as if to keep me there. I had never met someone so sure of himself. This confidence, I learned, could take a person places, but as far as I was concerned our journey would be ending soon. We had done enough for now. We were on a construction site. I imagined it resuming someplace else.

“I’m good,” I said when he offered me a drink, and then I crawled toward the opening of the shack. He slapped my butt, then grabbed me by the hipbones and pulled me onto his lap. It felt territorial and nice. He held me around my waist. “Stay.”

“Okay,” I said. I could stay a while longer. Outside, the clearing, smallish and asymmetrical like a skating pond; the fat stars, the fragrant trees, the flicker of flames from the bright, illegal bonfire. I was seeing poetry. I wanted poetry.

He moved his hands on my thighs. I could feel myself, my body, wanting. I could feel him hard under me. I moved, slightly, on top of him, and then I turned my head and kissed him, still moving the lower half of my body on his. At another pause I made to leave, but again he pulled me back onto him, as I knew he would.

“We should go,” I said, and leaned in for a closing peck, but he kissed me hard and sloppily and I decided to give it a go, give in to total desire, but it didn’t work. I was self-conscious about the people outside, about someone coming in and seeing us. I wanted public declaration, I wanted him as a boyfriend. I wanted dinner, a bed, music, sweetness, a mix tape. Love. While kissing, I opened one eye and through my fluttering lid I watched his closed eyes, his moving face. He looked like he was nursing, and I laughed in his mouth, then pulled away. He moved out from under me, then moved his chest against mine, pushing me, his mouth on my mouth, until my back was flat on the ground. My mouth was still in a nervous smile and he licked at my teeth.

“I want to fuck you so bad,” he said.

No mixed signals there.

He moved his hand through my hair, then under my jeans and down into my underwear.

“You’re so wet,” he said, and I didn’t know what to say in response. I was soaking but felt anything I said would sound ridiculous.
Indeed, I am so wet? Yes, I’m wet for you?
This was Seth—my object, my focus for so long—I was finally getting his attention, yet his words were making this bright star of a boy fade fast.
Don’t fade. Be perfect. Be from a book.
And so I too moved my hand under the buckle of his jeans and the elastic of his boxers. I wasn’t really enjoying myself any longer, but holding his penis was somehow less awkward than talking to him, and I hoped it was buying time for him to realize what was happening between us: intimacy. He stopped touching me and undid his jeans. Then he sat up and straddled me.

“I really like you,” he said.

“You should,” I said, trying to be coy. It was difficult to talk because of his weight, but I thought this made me sound sexy, breathy. I took a chance: “I like you too. I have for a while.”

I felt good just looking at him. Us, looking at each other.

“Do a little?” He rose up on his shins, then took his penis out. He poked my chin with it, then brushed part of my jawline with its tip. “Say ah,” he said, and laughed.

“Gross,” I said. I may have laughed even though for the first time I felt disgust and perhaps fear. I was trapped beneath him and was starting to become aware of the cold. “Let’s go back outside by the fire,” I said.
Don’t fade
.

He moved his hand gently from my hair down to the base of my neck.

“Come on,” he whispered. He rubbed my throat. I tucked my chin to catch his hand, and he moved up higher on my chest, then leaned over and placed his hands on the ground above my head. I opened my mouth and took him, my face feeling ugly and contorted. I stopped.

“I can’t.”

“A little more,” he said, a quiver in his voice.

I resumed my task. I was sick with myself for being too embarrassed to say no, but felt I had passed a certain point and that it would be unfair to stop. Finally, I said, “There,” and tried to sit up. Did I say, “I’m cold” or “Let’s go back”? I don’t remember.

He crept down my body and pulled my shirt and sweater up and kissed my stomach, then moved his face down to the zipper of my jeans and he unsnapped and unzipped and pulled both my underwear and pants down at the same time and shoved himself into me.

I said, calmly, “Stop. Stop,” and he did, soon after. He shuddered, moved farther in, fast, and then slowly out. The “out,” I have to say, was a shameful pleasure. It itched a scratch? I don’t know. As opposed to the mean thrusts, it was a gentle sensation, soothing what needed to be soothed. I wanted to cry from the release, from the feeling of having him out of me, almost (though I didn’t think this then) like giving birth.

I sat up. I could feel semen slide out of me, down into my buttocks. Seth buckled his jeans. I pulled up my underwear and my pants.

“You good?” he said.

I was not good. I was pregnant. I would find this out one month later. I would be terrified and alone, ashamed and so, so far from good. I no longer felt young. I had aged in seconds.

His voice, its lightness and softness: confusing. I don’t think I answered. I was crying, though he didn’t know that.

“I’m thirsty,” he said. “You’re cool, right? You’re good?”

He was polite. He said, “After you,” and I crawled out, stood up, then walked toward the party above me. I hated everyone there. Really. I walked up the hill, hated everyone. I walked up the hill, looked down at my pants, sure the wetness was visible. The moisture sickened me. It had been easy for him because of it, the residual desire. I thought it was blood because I was in pain, but it wasn’t.

I walked toward the fire. I felt my pubic hair freezing onto my skin. Each step, a tug.

He mumbled something and walked quickly in another direction, toward a group of guys by the surveyor line for the new lift. That was how I lost my virginity. It was one of those moments, and there weren’t too many of them, when I longed for my mother. I cried for her that night in bed, saying
Mom, Mommy, Mommy
out loud.

Kit walks into the antique shop. She sees me and heads in my direction. For the first time I wonder how my son treated her and if her decision has anything to do with him. I can’t imagine knowing something like that about your own child. I’d see Seth’s mom at the rec center sometimes, doing her step aerobics class. She always wore a belt around her leotard and would sing along to the music, whereas it seemed like everyone else was out of breath. You could be a good mom and it still didn’t matter.

“Nice bed,” Kit says.

Something is happening here, something nice, and I partly prefer the way it was before—untrusting and angry.

“You mind?” she says.

Would I mind what?
then realize what she wants.

“Hop on in,” I say.

She has to jump a little because she’s small like me and the frame is high off the ground. I look away as she gets settled because it feels like I’m seeing something private, like watching her dress.

“Are you going to tell Suzanne what’s going on?” Kit asks.

“I don’t want to,” I say. “She’s my friend, but I just don’t want her to . . . I don’t know.”

“Know you differently from the way she knows you now,” she says.

“Okay,” I say. “That sounds right.”

“Maybe I’m speaking for myself,” she says.

“She’s also ridiculously conservative,” I say.
I’m protecting you
, I don’t say.

We sit together and I look at our legs side by side.

“I had a bed like this,” I say.

“What kind is it?” she asks.

“The heavy kind,” I say.

She surveys the bed, puts her hand around a post. “Barley twist posters,” she says.

“How do you know that?”

“For a writing class in college I wrote a short story about girls who steal their mother’s antiques to pay for tickets to a Madonna concert. I researched French antiques with regional chart clues and clarifications.”

“Thorough,” I say. “Was it based on a true story?”

“It was based on someone else’s true story,” she says. “I would never do something like that. You are witnessing my wild stage.”

“Cully was a result of my wild stage,” I say. “My detour.”

“Good result,” she says, and I want to tell her it was, but at the same time I don’t want to sell her anything. Being a mother is so hard. No one tells you how difficult it is and even if they do, language doesn’t communicate the varied hues of motherhood.

“You must have done well in school,” I say. I eye another rocking chair and wonder how long it’s been sitting here and how much longer it will stay. I imagine myself rocking in it, in my empty home.

“I did okay,” Kit says. “I liked school, but I wasn’t crazy studious or anything. I just know odd things. I remember things you don’t need to remember.”

“Like what?”

“Like . . . ,” she says. We’re so close. I try to scoot over a bit without seeming rude. “George Washington had dentures made out of hippopotamus tusk.”

“Really,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says. “Dude had hippo teeth.”

“I loved school,” I say. “I was that annoying girl who always had her hand in the air.” I remember studying the course catalog, strategizing, choosing classes as if packing them for a trip. Each class added a layer to me so that I thought I was building myself. Each year was a chance to start over or to edit what I had built.

“You should go back,” she says.

I laugh, then my mind hitches onto the possibility of it, of any and everything. Demolition derby. Grad school. “Yeah,” I say, and stop myself from saying, “You should.”

“Your dad wants you to go to medical school?” I ask.

“He does,” she says. She laughs as if recalling something. “When I was little I’d go to the hospital after school a lot, sit in his office and do homework. Sometimes he’d bring me into the operating room. He’d pick me up so I could see the patient he was working on. He’d point out the liver, the heart, the fat. I loved it.”

I imagine her father’s forehead wrinkled with surprise by his daughter’s ability to look so closely at the insides of a body.

“But I loved that it was his,” she says. “His work. I don’t think it’s what I want to do.”

“I have trouble picturing you and Cully together,” I say. I see him on the skate ramp. I see him in college, backpacking trails by himself or hiking with his snowboard to untouched terrain. I see him on the Million Dollar Highway, all cool and able.