“How’s that?”
“You follow your heart, pretty American lady.” Hilde smiled. “Don’t let me persuade you differently.”
“But what do you mean?”
“I mean we are no longer cataloguing life with art, which is perhaps why art is failing. Life itself has become the final disposable, exploitable resource. We will do anything. Level whole mountains, erase whole species, relocate mighty rivers, burn forests to the ground, change the pH of the water, blanket ourselves in toxic chemistry. It took two million years for our species just to stand up and only five hundred generations to do the rest. Our culture is one of abundance, of entitlement, and basically little else. We’ve put our birthright at risk because we don’t know how to control ourselves. Our lust.”
In the years that followed, her memory of Hilde came with slices of imagined scenes: a bar’s low yellow lighting, the underside of a bridge at night, a lace slip tossed over an antique metal screen, smoky whiskey stirring in a glass—but it would also come with that word lust used to describe not sexual desire but a remembrance of evil not yet done. Without understanding why, Stacey found her feelings hurt. It was in that very specific way from childhood when the older girl you love so much suddenly turns to you at recess and calls you stupid for believing a thing that before seemed so self-evident. “No such thing as the tooth fairy!” That kind of thing. They walked the streets of Zagreb on their last day together and Stacey couldn’t think of much to say. Hilde had an early flight back to Berlin the next morning and woke Stacey only to tell her to sleep in. When Stacey finally did get up (too enamored of the plush hotel bed to not milk every last dream from it), she found a note leaning against a coffee cup.
Stacey,
Don’t listen to an old, bitter woman. The heat in the oceans cannot stop literature nor joy! Here’s some Yeats, lovely girl. Enjoyed our weekend together immensely.
And beneath this a snippet from a poem. An artifact she planned to hang on to.
The stoplights all burned green as far as she could see. She opened the passenger door of her Jeep and picked up the envelope with her letter. Sharp white edges pricked the pads of her fingers. She felt in herself the rebellion of doing the hard thing yet again.
She slipped the letter into her purse, ready to set off, but then, like an apparition, the zombie version of her freshman year homecoming date appeared before her covered in blood.
Jonah Hansen’s sneakers patted the pavement, and as they approached, the dismembered horse clops of her boots mixed with these new percussions to nearly create a beat.
It wasn’t the Jonah who had slipped the corsage on her wrist and then made a farting noise at his friends while all the couples’ parents took pictures. It was Jonah grown up, buzzed head of hair going chemo-patient bald and seeming to bulge in a vaguely alien way with one of those ridiculous beards now popular in exurban America, the kind where the sideburns grow in a thin line down the jaw, connecting at the chin. It was Jonah with blood coating his nostrils and streaming down over his lips and chin, a cravat of dried crimson on his T-shirt. They both stopped and regarded each other. Tears crawled from his eyes, comingling with the ruins of his nose. He didn’t say anything, so she felt it incumbent to acknowledge who each of them were.
“Jonah? It’s Stacey. Stacey Moore.”
He sniffed back blood and tears.
“Hey,” he said, a noncommittal grunt.
“Are you okay?”
His eyes flitted evasively. She wondered if he had gotten jumped or hit by a car. “Yeah,” he said.
“Your nose.”
“S’fine.”
She looked around the square to see what might be open. Of course, it was only the diner.
“Here, why don’t we go into Vicky’s? We’ll get some napkins and ice.”
He regarded her with suspicion.
“Didn’t I hear you were a dyke now?”
Her laugh was loud and surprised. “That has no impact on my knowledge of how to stop a bloody nose.”
He chortled, the blood rattling in his sinuses.
“C’mon,” she said, and he followed her back in.
Senior year Jonah Hansen had all the wildest parties. His dad traveled a lot (although he was a local real estate baron, so that didn’t make much sense) and his mother was a wraith, almost without presence (which usually meant a pill addiction). Jonah was popular by virtue of his family’s barn, which wasn’t a barn in the horse-and-hayloft sense but an enormous rec room decked out with a TV, surround sound speakers, a huge multi-couch seating area, pool table, and air hockey. In a factory and farming community like New Canaan, it was kids like Jonah who tended to command high social status, the “preps” as they were all called, and when you’re a teenager and have never read Marx, you just think in this tautology: “These are the popular people because they’re popular.” Only in hindsight do you understand you could probably correlate the cliques of high school directly to each family’s bank account.
Like Stacey, Jonah was a Grover Street kid, and his family went to her church. At a party in sixth grade, he dealt perhaps the greatest, most horrific blow to her adolescent self-esteem when they were playing Spin the Bottle at Ron Kruger’s house. They’d already been through the first round of kissing without tongue. Someone suggested they leap to “feeling up,” and Stacey was terrified but not enough to object to this new level of intimacy. On the very first spin, Jonah landed the bottle on her, and he said—she would never forget—“What? How’m I supposed to get a feel on those mosquito bites?”
Some of the girls gasped, some of the boys laughed, and Stacey sat mortified, smiled, and then allowed his hand to cup her training bra while they kissed anyway. She thought about this incident the rest of that year.
When Jonah asked her to homecoming freshman year, she’d angrily thought of that moment, wanting to ask him if her breasts were sufficiently filled in for him now. But your first homecoming is an event where you’re already terrified of who will ask you, and she had it on good information that a rather unfortunate-looking boy named Amos Flood was plotting to corner her. Amos was acne-riddled, overweight, frighteningly sweaty, and to the previous point, poor. He and his cousins lived on a farm/compound and the parents were in jail or gone, the grandparents left to scrape for a pack of troubled kids. Stacey made the error of being kind to him in an eighth-grade home economics class, and she’d felt him longing for her ever since. To a freshman girl already petrified by the thought of stepping outside the boundaries, who had popular older brothers (one graduated, one on the football team) and was desperate to not be the weird little sister, Amos was unacceptable. Jonah at least made for a decent excuse to turn Amos down gently.
Her parents—especially her mom—did not like the Hansens. Rarely an unkind word to say about anybody, she referred to Jonah’s dad, Burt, as “the used-car salesman.” When Stacey visited her folks after returning briefly from Europe in 2010, the Hansens had been a hot topic of conversation because her dad couldn’t figure how Burt Hansen had not lost his shirt in the crash. It made no sense, according to her dad, because there wasn’t a buyer left for all the housing developments Burt had financed over the last ten years, yet they’d heard from the Eatons that he’d just bought a new boat. Such was the way of the Hansens, though.
“Some people are just impervious to bad luck,” her dad said.
It was from Jonah’s homecoming party their senior year that Stacey pilfered a bottle of vodka from his stash. She and Lisa had gone stag, made a brief appearance at Jonah’s, then slipped away to Lisa’s house. They had to wait for Bethany to go to bed before cracking open the vodka, and Stacey remembered Bethany gently cleaning the makeup off her daughter’s face. (“You look so beautiful the way you do this eyeliner, you’ll have to show me that.”) Even though all Stacey wanted was to go up to Lisa’s room where the vodka waited in her overnight bag, and even though Lisa’s constant carping had taught her to view Bethany as an odious old troll out to ruin all their fun, Stacey watched and thought about how mother and daughter looked, for once, at peace and in love.