Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking Read online

  Ana gestured for me to go ahead of her out the door and I thanked him and followed her.

  “I didn’t mean for you to pay,” I said as soon as we got onto the sidewalk.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said.

  “How about if I take you out to dinner then?” I said when we got into the van.

  She offered me a cigarette and took one for herself. “Your neighborhood or mine?”

  “Yours,” I said playfully, looking down the street.

  She shook her head, her mouth pursed, lighting her cigarette. “If it’s my neighborhood I’m paying,” she said, exhaling.

  “Then mine.”

  “Then we have to go back to my house for a second so I can change.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said, pulling out of the parking space. “I gotta look respectable.”

  Her building was squeezed between rows of brownstones on a narrow street a few minutes away from the dressmaker’s shop, but we had to drive around the block for a while to find a parking spot. It was late in the afternoon and people were walking home holding plastic bags of groceries, wheeling carts full of meticulously folded laundry. On one corner by a grocery store a few boys bounced a ball into the street in front of us.

  Nearby, a group of boys sat on a stoop watching us circling. Two of them were wearing thick gold chains around their necks like medals—they lounged comfortably, like they knew they could be noticeable if they felt like it: in front of them was an empty parking spot, allowing them full view of the street. Ana passed over the spot the first time, but the second time she turned down her music and pulled in. They watched her deft parking without seeming to look at us at all, but at the sound of my heels on the pavement we came into sharp focus. Ana slammed her door and got out on the sidewalk in front of them. One of the boys with a necklace said something to her in Spanish, which she pretended not to hear.

  I hurried to catch up, trying to stay steady. “White girl looks like she needs a taste of something real,” one boy said to another, in a conversational tone.

  “Hey, Mami,” said the boy who had spoken in Spanish, “you forgot your dick?” They all laughed.

  Ana flushed and kept walking. I strode along beside her, terrified. “Fucking assholes,” she said, under her breath, without slowing down.

  I wanted to erase it, and tell her that she shouldn’t care—that I didn’t care—but it felt so terrible that I knew I did care, and so did she. When we got to her building she opened the outer door with her keys and we walked up the stairs in punished silence. I couldn’t tell if she was angry or if she was going to cry. I wanted to be angry but instead I had a strange, hollow feeling inside me—a kind of disbelief—and I kept turning the moment over in my mind, as if I could correct it somehow, or as if I’d misremembered it.

  When she let me into the apartment we moved around each other with embarrassment. “I’ll be real quick,” she said, ducking into what I assumed was her bedroom.

  The living room was small with a large flowered couch and a matching armchair taking up most of the space. It was lavishly decorated but scrupulously neat, a few stray toys the only evidence of her sister’s children; a small kitchen extended behind it, with a picture of the Virgin Mary on the patterned wall, struck by afternoon light. Ana must have known no one would be home; it was hard to imagine the whole family inside such a small space. I got up to look at the miniature skyline of picture frames above the television. I found a photo of Ana’s communion in a big gold frame: she was looking miserably at the camera, dwarfed by her oversize dress, her hair hopelessly frizzy.

  “That’s the only picture they have of me in a dress,” she said, coming out of her room in a fresh T-shirt and pants and sitting down on the couch to put on her shoes. “So of course it’s the one they keep out.”

  I turned away, not sure if she wanted me to look at it, and sat down beside her with my hands in my lap. She took a deep breath and leaned back like she was suddenly exhausted.

  “Maybe we should have a beer,” she said.

  I reached for her hand and she looked up at me apologetically. “At least I didn’t get the shit beaten out of me,” she said.

  I raised her hand to my lips and kissed it. She looked at me intently and I leaned forward and kissed her on the lips. We were kissing very gently at first: then we’d draw away, and look at each other, like we were both swimming in the same feeling—of needing each other—and then we’d start over again. It turned into a sort of rhythm, and then grew urgent, and slipped back again, into a soft pattern. I put my hand up to touch her face and as she turned toward me I reached down to her breasts.

  Somehow then we were lying on the couch: I was lying on top of her. She was warm and clean and her body was firm under mine. I put my hand under her shirt and felt the smooth skin of her stomach, and suddenly I wanted nothing more than to be inside her. I left her kisses and leaned down to kiss along the top of her pants. When I looked up at her again she was watching me with a wistful kind of tenderness, and as I pulled her pants over her hips she lifted herself on the couch to let me take them down. She was wearing white cotton underwear, and I kissed the pungent place between her legs, feeling the springy hair underneath, before I pulled them down too, to reveal a broad black triangle of pubic hair.

  I looked up at her, afraid to touch it. She took my hand and put it between her legs, pressing it inside to feel the place where she was slippery and full. Something broke, something broke in me. I had never felt anything so soft. I touched it and stroked it until I was leaning over her, stroking her faster and faster, pushing my fingers deeper, moving in and out of her, thrusting, until she cried out and curled up, her whole body snapping like elastic, and I felt a wave of heat emptying me like a sob.

  I don’t know how long we lay there in the dark, or when she began to stroke my hair away from my temples. I felt as if I’d been asleep for hours. But I know I was sitting up, dizzily taking a sip of my beer and handing hers to her when we heard voices in the hall. She jerked up her pants in less time than it took me to realize what was happening, and as I stood, loose-limbed and strange, she pointed with a mad kind of urgency toward the bathroom door.

  I had only just made it across the room and through the door when the voices came in from hallway and rattled the living room. I didn’t move from my place behind the door, holding myself perfectly still. I heard another woman’s voice joining the others, the light cadence of a child among them. After a few minutes I looked around me. Everything was pink: the sink, the tub, the toilet, the bar of soap on the sink, the shower curtain tucked neatly into the tub. I felt oddly calm. I heard the television turned on, the female voices shouting over it, then that music Ana played in her van carrying through the wall.

  Just as I was wondering whether to lock the door, it opened. A small child, concentrating on his own adventure, crawled toward the edge of the pink tub. When he looked up he was surprised to see me—but no more surprised, I suppose, than he had been to find that the door pushed open, or that the pink bathroom mat was soft. He sat back on his diapered bottom and gave me a serious look. I smiled at him and he watched me a little uncertainly, but when I smiled again he smiled back, willing to be charmed. My new courage hadn’t gone away; this seemed to me a strange sign that I belonged. I made a face, and he laughed, and no sooner had he made the noise than I heard Ana’s voice outside the door.

  I was just in time to block the door from smacking into him. “Go now!” she said, her face lit with panic. “I’ll meet you outside.”

  It seems possible that I had never picked up a child in my life before that moment, but I scooped him up and deposited him into her arms before I walked out of the bathroom. A young woman came out of the kitchen at the same moment and before she could say a word Ana had transferred the child into her arms and put her finger over her lips.

  “¿Quién es ella?” I heard the girl say, as I let myself out the door.

  I stood for a few
minutes on the street outside the building but I wasn’t sure whether or not I should be seen. The boys on the corner were gone. I crossed to the other side of the street and walked back to where I could watch the door. When Ana came out she looked around coolly and then headed in my direction, her face casual, her hands thrust into her pockets. I took in her dark messy hair, her loose cotton shirt, the jeans I had unzipped earlier. She walked up to the other side of the car I was lurking behind.

  “Wanna go to dinner?” she said across the hood, smiling.

  Neither of us knew where to go to dinner downtown. I didn’t want to take her to any of the places I’d been to with Nate, and I didn’t know how to get to them by car anyway. We parked in the West Village and walked around, trying to get a sense of what the other wanted, and then we walked into a place with a garden in back and the murmur of people. I ordered a bottle of wine. We had salads, and a meal, and ordered another bottle of wine, even though we were already drunk.

  She told me about the first time she kissed a girl and the first time she kissed a boy; she told me about when she learned to speak English and when she started cutting her hair short and the first time her sister got pregnant; she told me about her mother’s family in Santo Domingo and her father’s mistresses on the north coast.

  I told her how I used to want to be a tree and she laughed. “Why didn’t you want to be a person?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “I was already a person.”

  “You didn’t like it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I looked at her. “I didn’t always like it so much I guess. Haven’t you ever wanted to be something else?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Like a rich person. All trees do is stand there.”

  “They see everything.”

  “Yeah, but they can’t do anything about it.”

  “I know, but they don’t want to,” I said. “I mean they’re not sad, and they don’t need to remember anything. They’re just growing.”

  She took a sip of her wine. “Were you sad when you were a kid?”

  “Not really,” I said. “My father was, though. I mean when I was growing up.” The waitress came to clear our plates. “I found out he used to sing, at parties.”

  She smiled. “You sure he wasn’t drunk?”

  “No, he’s drunk plenty at home and he never sings.” It came out more harshly than I had meant it. “Supposedly he has a really beautiful voice.”

  “Maybe he should have been a rock star,” she said, refusing my seriousness.

  I smiled despite myself, feeling the melancholy pull of the wine. “Do you want dessert?” I asked her. What I wanted was to tell her everything: how sometimes he hardly spoke to me for days, and sometimes that didn’t even matter because I knew what he needed anyway. Once when he was asleep on the couch I kissed him on the forehead and he didn’t wake up. And then when I kissed him on the lips he just frowned and rubbed his nose, as if he’d felt a fly. And once, in the middle of the night, I’d heard him crying—an awful, thin sound. I’d stayed awake until it stopped, feeling as if I was crying myself.

  Ana was watching me. “What do you want to be now?” she said gently.

  “I don’t know,” I said, smiling at her. “An artist, maybe.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” I said, shy. “What do you want to be?”

  “A rich person,” she said again. “Or anyway someone who doesn’t have to live with my family.”

  “How about you stay with me tonight then?” I said, snatching the bill before she could get it.

  25

  It seemed we were barely asleep before she was out of bed and dressed again, giving me a kiss goodbye. When I woke up a few hours later the red dress was slung over my desk chair like a piece of a dream. It was noon and I’d told Nate I’d get to Connecticut by three. I got up and showered and put on my jeans and packed my two dresses into a knapsack. Ana had left a note for me on a page torn out of my sketchbook, written in charcoal pencil. “Have fun in the dress,” it said. Below that she had written her address and phone number. Ana Mones. I put her note in my bag too and then went downstairs and cooked myself some eggs. Robert showed me how to get to Grand Central Station, and an hour later I was walking across the marble lobby and down onto the platforms for the trains to Connecticut.

  Nate was waiting for me on the platform at Mystic, wearing a bright red sweater, his shoulders hunched against the seaside chill. I had slept the whole trip and I watched blearily as he strode forward to the gate. He kissed me on the cheek and took my knapsack from me as we walked to the car. We drove through the fussy town in minutes and soon there were salt marshes stretched out on either side of us, spotted with black ducks.

  “Where’s the ocean?” I asked him.

  He smiled. “You’ll see it when we get to the house,” he said. “I can’t wait for you to meet everybody.”

  “I should maybe—get a cup of coffee,” I said, without really meaning to, and he laughed.

  “They’re not that bad. I’ll make you one there.”

  I smiled, and he took my hand. We went across a small bridge, which turned out to be part of their driveway. White oaks sheltered the sandy circle at the end of it, landscaped with huge rhododendrons. Motorboats were dry-docked discreetly beside a smaller house that Nate referred to as “the cottage.”

  We went in through the kitchen door. Liz and another blond woman I took to be Mrs. Stoddard were filling out place cards with their backs to a wall of picture windows, outside of which a big white tent was being put up. In spite of the autumn chill, both women were wearing tennis clothes. Liz gave me a little wave, but stayed where she was sitting, and Mrs. Stoddard came around the table to shake my hand. Her socks, I noticed distractedly, came just to the brim of her shoes and had little yellow balls attached to them. I felt my blue jeans being examined for the worse: the girlish absurdity of her outfit only seemed to enhance her authority. She had Nate’s regal features and Liz’s shining blond hair, a magazine smile. “How was your trip?” she asked.

  “Has anyone seen my sledgehammer?” Nate’s father interrupted, coming into the kitchen. “I think we should give those tent pegs a couple more knocks into the ground.”

  “Come meet Miranda, Hal,” said his wife.

  He came over to shake my hand. “Nice to meet you,” I said, feeling them all watching me.

  “Got a good grip,” he said to his audience. He winked at me, not the way Mr. Blackwell used to, but the way people do in high school musicals, when they’re singing a song with a joke in it. “Nate tells me your father’s some kind of genius, isn’t that right?”

  “I’m afraid the tent’s going to fall down anyway, Daddy,” Liz said, looking out the window. “They told me they’re having a hurricane in Florida.”

  “It’s a hurricane warning, Princess.”

  “I’m sure the people who put up the tent know what they’re doing,” said Mrs. Stoddard, sitting back down with Liz. “Anyway, I thought you were going to move the boats out of the driveway first.”

  “I thought the boatyard was sending someone,” Mr. Stoddard said, putting the sledgehammer over his shoulder.

  “You’re not a vegetarian are you, Miranda?” she asked me, ignoring him. “Lizzie thought you might be.”

  “No,” I said, feeling as if I should have been.

  “Tink,” Mr. Stoddard said, “do you mean I’m going to have to call Parker myself?”

  “I don’t know what has to happen for you to move those boats,” she said, going back to her place cards. “I told you to leave them in the water until the wedding was over. We could call the boatyard, but that’s up to you, and your mother will be arriving in an hour.”

  “Nate,” Liz said in what I thought for a second was a parody of her mother’s voice, “would you mind calling over to where the Vances are staying to make sure the other groomsmen know about the rehearsal?”

  “I think we should send him over to the club, Lizzie,” Mrs. Stoddard i
ntervened as her husband stalked off. “Marjorie has some idea about the club not having enough ice for the dinner.”

  “She doesn’t have some idea, Mom, their ice machine is broken. And it won’t take that long for him to call over there.”

  “Why don’t you do it yourself then,” Nate said without an ounce of exasperation, bringing a carton of orange juice out of the refrigerator and pouring himself a glass without offering any to me. He drank it down thirstily, as if he was suddenly remembering how long he had been craving it. For a minute, I saw him as I imagined his mother must have, as an overgrown boy. “How many bags of ice does she need?” he said, looking over at her.

  “You can take some money from my purse.” She nodded at the leather bag on the counter.

  “Do you want to come with me?”

  I looked up in surprise, having almost forgotten that I was standing in the middle of them. “Sure,” I said brightly, as if I would have been equally happy to have been left behind. Nate rummaged in his mother’s bag the same way he opened the refrigerator, stuffing a few bills into his pocket and gesturing for me to follow him back out the door.

  “Don’t forget that we have to be here to rehearse at six,” Liz yelled as the screen door slammed behind us.

  I ran to catch up with him. “Who are the Vances?” I asked.

  “Geoffrey’s parents,” he said, annoyed.

  I wished I’d remembered to ask him again for the coffee. “Is it always like this?” I said before I knew it.

  “Like what?”

  “Busy?” I suggested.

  “Well, the wedding is tomorrow,” he said, climbing into the driver’s seat, the muscles on either side of his jaw standing out oddly.

  I’d said the wrong thing, of course. I looked out the window as we started back out across the marsh. Ana seemed like a dream, or some kind of crazy misadventure. Nate was quiet, concentrating on driving. He had always been kind, and this was his family, after all, whether he liked it or not. He loved them, the way I loved my father, and he was doing his best for them.