I'll Stay Page 3

  I felt a jolt of anger that was familiar and utterly exhausting. “Look, I don’t exactly know what’s going on—”

  “Something’s changed between us,” she said.

  She was right. She’d changed. She used to be so strong, intimidating, and mysterious. She’d command attention and respect just by walking into a room. Now she was clingy and needy, always sulking and sad. She kept cornering me, wanting to talk, wanting to dump it on me, and I’d begun finding excuses to avoid her.

  I licked my sunburned lips. We were always each other’s cheerleader but she was so sensitive now. Would she freak out if I told her how much she’d changed? If I said I didn’t want to talk so much about how sad she was? God, it felt daunting. It felt impossible. She felt impossible.

  But I was the house therapist. Everyone brought problems to me. Why wasn’t I more patient with her?

  “I know I’ve been upset about what happened to my aunt.” Her voice shook. “I don’t get why she can’t call. What if I never talk to her again? What if this is it?”

  How many times had she said this to me over the last few weeks, twenty? Fifty? I shook my head and said, “That doesn’t make sense. She loves you.”

  “I don’t even know if that’s true,” she mumbled.

  “So, now you don’t think that she loves you? Come on, Lee.” I glanced into the kitchen where Ducky was doing a shot of something.

  “I know. I just feel awful.” She slumped against the window.

  “I feel bad about what happened to your aunt, too,” I said. And I did, even if I couldn’t relate to her family. Visiting her farm last year had been a shock. It was so rundown and shabby, unlike anything I’d imagined. That she’d gotten out of there and gone to college, even with help from her benefactor, was incredible. “But like I’ve said before, you’ve got to find a way not to let this get you down so much.”

  “You’re right. I don’t know why I can’t get over this. And I had another one of those dreams last night.”

  Oh, crap.

  “This time you and I were standing in line for a bus and everyone got on and you shut the door on me,” she said. “Then the bus took off. You left me behind.”

  She’d been having these dreams long before I began pulling away. Once, she dreamed that I dumped her and became best friends with Susie. In another, I’d invited her to our cottage on Martha’s Vineyard but then ignored her while she was there. I didn’t understand these dreams and it didn’t seem fair that I was always the bad guy. “That’s crazy, Lee. Why would I ever shut a bus door on you?”

  She shrugged. “I just feel stressed. I miss our talks. And I worry about us—”

  I couldn’t stand this. “We’re both stressed. It’s the end of senior year and neither of us knows what we’re doing next. It’s a weird time for everyone.”

  “I know, but something has changed—”

  “Stop! We’re going through a rough patch. You’re still my best friend, okay?”

  She nodded. Then the crease in her forehead disappeared and the tightness loosened in her cheeks. Just like that the mood lightened, the thickness between us softened. I held my eyes steady, even though I was confused. Yes, I’d pulled back. But she made it worse by telling me about these dreams and worrying so much.

  “Okay. I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re right. As always.”

  “I’m not always right. Don’t keep saying that. Let’s just have fun—”

  “What are you guys doing over here?” Sarah came up behind us. “You gotta help me with Ducky. I don’t know what to do. She’s completely trashed again.”

  The music started, the Rolling Stones, as we watched Ducky, staggering toward the bathroom and then grabbing the water heater to steady herself.

  “I’ll go.” I hurried over, reached for Ducky’s elbow and steered her into the bathroom. When I flipped on the light, a huge cockroach scurried behind the sink. The room was tight with no windows, a tub with no shower curtain, a toilet and a small pedestal sink that was coated in toothpaste and brown crud.

  “I think I’m gonna get sick.” Ducky’s knees buckled.

  “Wait!” I flipped up the toilet seat, pulled a towel off a hook on the wall, and draped it around the dirty rim. I spread a second towel on the floor at the base of the toilet. When Ducky dropped to her knees and leaned forward, her blond hair went with her. I quickly and expertly—like I’d done for my mother that time in New York—pulled her hair behind her and held it while she threw up.

  Projective vomit filled the toilet and fumes leaped into the air. I buried my face in my sweatshirt sleeve and stifled my gags. She finished and tried to stand.

  “Hang on.” I let go of her hair and flushed the toilet. “Just wait here a second. You don’t want to stand too quickly and faint. Try to relax.”

  She rested her head on the toilet, her white-blond eyebrows quivering. She smelled like vomit, beer, and the Lubriderm lotion she always wore. I reached for a magazine on the floor (Thrasher?), rolled it up, and watched for the cockroach. I felt mild disgust for how wasted she’d gotten. Something bad could have happened to her if we weren’t here to help.

  She peeked at me, and as if hearing my thoughts said, “You can go.”

  I knew she meant it. She’d never asked me for anything. Never demanded anything. I felt myself relax. “It’s okay. I won’t leave you alone.”

  “Thanks,” she slurred, then grimaced and closed her eyes.

  I wasn’t as close to Ducky as I was with Lee and Sarah. We didn’t have much in common. I was an English major from Boston. She was a business major from the North Shore of Chicago. After we graduated I imagined she’d marry a nice boy from the Midwest, raise four nice kids, and sit by a nice country club pool every summer.

  After word was out in the house about my mother (somebody from our sorority’s national office told our president), Ducky said, “Gosh! I’ve never met a real writer before!” Her earnestness was refreshing. She never took herself too seriously. God, I was so tired of people taking themselves so damn seriously.

  “I’m going to get sick!” As she sat up and dry heaved into the toilet, I held her hair again. Then she slumped against the wall and started to whimper. In a few minutes, if she no longer had the dry heaves, I’d make her splash water on her face and wash out her mouth. That might help. That might make her feel better.

  That was what I’d done for my mother when I found her in a heap on the floor in the hotel bathroom before the North American Book Award ceremony. She’d left me at the table with her editor and others I didn’t know. I was only eleven and no one was paying attention to me. So, no one noticed when I followed her.

  “It’s not worth it, this agony,” she moaned when she saw me in the toilet stall doorway. She was on her knees, her legs splayed behind her, new black patent leather shoes—mine were just like hers but smaller—toe down on the marble floor. I’d never seen her in such a vulnerable position and I was too stunned to move.

  I also didn’t understand how she could say that it wasn’t worth it. Listen, Before You Go, narrated by eleven-year-old Phoebe whose older brother, Whit, had just returned from the Vietnam War with a broken leg and damaged soul, was loved by so many people. She loved it, too. Once, I heard her talk for twenty minutes about the importance of the comma in the title. And she’d just won a huge, prestigious literary prize. This was all she’d ever wanted. How many times had I heard her complain when others had won?

  “Help me,” she’d moaned.

  It was a guttural, primal call, and I’d never heard this before, either. All I thought about as I stood in the stall of the swankiest hotel I’d ever been in was that it made no sense. My mother was a college professor, an expert on John Milton. Her novel was a best seller. She had “saved my life,” a woman cried to her one day in Emack & Bolio’s ice-cream store. What in the world could I do?

  Then I thought about Phoebe (I was sure this was what she’d do) and with my fingers, pulled my mother’s long brown hair
out of her face—every strand—while she threw up. She flinched when my fingers grazed her neck. I remembered that. But I saved her hair and the beautiful black dress on which we’d spent so much money.

  I leaned toward Ducky and said, “Do you think you can stand up?”

  She kept her eyes closed and shook her head. “No, and don’t leave!”

  “Okay.” I was in no hurry to face Lee with her crazy dreams and Socratic references. The unexamined life is not worth living. Would Ducky ever examine her life? And if not, who were we—or who was Socrates—to judge whether that life was worthwhile or not? And what did it mean to examine your life, anyway? Keep a diary? Go to the health center and talk to a counselor? Write a book and tell-all?

  I stood and washed my hands in the sink as I looked at myself in the mirror. I was totally average; chestnut-colored hair resting on my shoulders, hazel eyes, white teeth and a small nose with freckles. I’d put on weight, but not much. Would Phoebe, if my mother ever wrote about her again, look like me now? Or would I look like her? Phoebe has the same freckles as you, people used to tell me. Phoebe has the same eyes! You and Phoebe are so good at talking to adults. Why, you’re Phoebe!

  I squatted and stared at Ducky, her nose burned from the sun, a roll of pink flesh spilling out over the top of her shorts. She opened her eyes and smiled. After we graduated and she went home to the North Shore and I went back East, I imagined we wouldn’t see each other much. This, along with the fact that we were bonding and she was wasted and probably wouldn’t remember, made me feel daring. And so I brought up something I’d never discussed with anyone in the house.

  “How do you think Lee has been acting?” I asked.

  “Like what do you mean?” Ducky squinted at me.

  “I don’t know, on the trip, I guess. Like with the Sigma Chis.”

  “Same old Lee.” She burped and groaned, but nothing came out. “Sometimes I don’t know why she joined the house. She’s so different from everyone else.”

  I nodded. I used to wonder this, too, until one day when Lee, gazing up at the glass chandelier in the foyer, said, “Isn’t this house the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen? Aren’t we so lucky to live here? We’re like one big family.”

  If Ducky wondered why I’d joined the house, too, she didn’t ask. Which was good because at the moment I wasn’t sure I could answer.

  She burped again, a sweet, polite one that sounded like the chirp of a baby bird. “I’ve never told anyone this—Oh! I’m so wasted but that burp kinda made me feel better—and I know you’re best friends and all but Lee scares me. She’s got all this intense stuff inside of her. Like that thing with the periods. Who thinks of stuff like that? I don’t know. She doesn’t really talk to me. You know, like talk-talk.”

  “Do you think she can be, I don’t know, insensitive sometimes?” I asked.

  “Maybe she doesn’t talk to me because she thinks I’m stupid about movies and the world. Which I kinda am. Remember that movie she made sophomore year? How good it was and funny and how she got Mom Tolliver to agree to be in it? Or did you do that? I can’t remember. Mom Tolliver likes you two more than she likes me.”

  “That’s not necessarily true.”

  Ducky grimaced and closed her eyes. Lee’s movie, her first, came out of an assignment in a film class. She got so many people in the house involved. Sarah and Amy were gangsters, the dinner cooks hid the gun in the angel food cake batter, and Mom Tolliver, our seventy-year-old house mom, drove the getaway car. Lee showed it one night in the chapter room. It was a huge hit.

  Ducky’s eyes shot open. “Do you think she’ll make a movie about us?”

  I frowned. Why would anyone want her life on a screen for the world to see? Besides, we’d have to actually do something to warrant a movie. Drinking beer, smoking pot, and laughing around a dining room table night after night, year after year, wasn’t very productive or interesting. I cringed, thinking about my four years of college. I. Had. Done. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

  “Wow! I think I am feeling better.” She sat up and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Wanna hear something funny? I used to think, back when we were pledges, that, you know, you two were, you know. Well. Together.”

  “You mean, like, lesbians?” I asked.

  Ducky put her hand over her mouth. “Yes!”

  I frowned. Did anyone else think that? “Why did you think that?”

  “Because you were both, like, so intense with each other, you know, huddled in the corner being all intellectual and stuff. But then I got to know you both and now you’re with Ben, and I think it’s more like you and Lee are, well, I don’t know, friendship soul mates or something. Am I talking too much?”

  Lee and I were intense with each other and it was like being in love. I thought back to our nights talking in the stairwell and the trips we took to each other’s houses, but I couldn’t remember any awkward sexual moments. I’d never felt that way toward her. Had she with me? I doubted it. Lee, who’d lost her virginity when she was fifteen, had slept with many guys. Still, I tried to put into words this feeling between us. Intense. Important. One of a kind. Maybe soul mates.

  “I’m so wasted!” Ducky said. “But isn’t this fun? What about that bathing suit guy? I can’t believe these people. And their haircuts. My parents would freak if they knew we were here. Is Donny still a drug dealer? But just pot, right? I can’t wait to tell everyone about this. And oh, I just love you. I know you think I’m not respectful because I don’t talk to you about your mom’s book. But I read it.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “Don’t tell anyone about this, okay?” She started hiccupping. “I mean, that I hurled and everything? Cause I’m so wasted? I think it was the pot.”

  “And the tequila shots,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m feeling better! I know you won’t tell anyone. Because you don’t talk about people. I know what you did for Julie. She told me that you went to the clinic with her and waited until it was over and then drove her home and brought her soup. And you never told anyone, did you? Not even Lee.”

  Julie’s abortion at Planned Parenthood last year. Of course I never told anyone. But I felt my cheeks burn because I’d just gossiped about Lee. But maybe that didn’t count since I didn’t say anything. I just asked about her. I tightened my grip on the magazine.

  “I have a lot of respect for you,” she said. “I know you’re an English major but you should do something where you help people. You’d be a great nurse. I’ll cry if I talk about it but I can’t believe we’re graduating in two months. It went so fast!”

  Then she started whimpering and I worried that she might have the dry heaves again. “Hey, hey. It’s okay. Let’s enjoy these last couple of months. Okay?”

  She nodded and rested her forehead on the toilet rim.

  I’d always planned to teach, but changed my mind after visiting the clinic. The women who helped Julie were so passionate and warm. My plan was to take science courses next fall and then apply to graduate school in nursing or counseling. I didn’t know where. Lee and I talked about moving to New York. And one night not long ago, Ben asked if I’d go with him to Philadelphia, where he’d been accepted to law school. I could barely even think about that.

  You should help people. I smiled. I’d always been good at that (Phoebe and me. Me and Phoebe). Maybe after working for a while, I’d feel passionate about it, too.

  Someone banged on the door. “What the fuck is going on in there?”

  “Just a minute.” I lowered my voice. “Can you get up?”

  Ducky stood and leaned on me as I pulled down the bottom of her sweatshirt and told her to wipe her face. I moved the clasp on her pearls to behind her head and opened the door. The lights were on. Most everyone was gone. Donny and the halter top girl stood next to Sarah and a guy I didn’t recognize. It was two a.m.

  When the halter top girl slipped her arm through Donny’s, I realized why she was still here. Sarah yawned. And
Ducky, whose face had turned pale again, stumbled over to the La-Z-Boy chair next to the floor lamp and slumped into it.

  “She’s a mess,” Sarah said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Just let her sleep in the chair.”

  That left only a small, dry spot next to the chair. I glanced at the puddles of beer on the floor and thought about the cockroach in the bathroom.

  “This is Charlie,” Sarah said. “He said two of us could crash at his place.”

  “He lives a couple blocks away,” Donny said. “It’s cool.”

  Charlie was old, maybe twenty-five, with short dirty blond hair that was thinning across his forehead. He had small black eyes that never seemed to blink and crisscrossing acne scars along his jaw. He was tall with broad shoulders and arms ripped with muscles. I bet he lifted weights like Ben and his friends.

  He wedged his fingers into the pockets of his skintight, acid-washed jeans. Now I recognized him. He’d been here all along, one of the guys standing by the refrigerator. Still, we didn’t know him. I glanced at Lee, who was studying him, too.

  “I’ll stay here with Ducky,” Sarah said. “You two okay going with Charlie?”

  Lee tilted her head. I knew her well enough to see the hesitation. Then she shrugged and licked her lips. “Okay, I guess. We need to get our stuff out of the car.”

  Charlie nodded.

  It was still raining. Lee and I ran across the yard and grabbed our backpacks, sleeping bags, and pillows from The Travelodge. Then we followed Charlie. Most of the streetlights were burned out—it was so dark—and we had to hurry to keep up. How many blocks was it? We were soaked by the time we got to his house. Outside it looked like Donny’s and the others on the street, small, one-story, with a big window next to the front door. The inside was like Donny’s, too, one tight room with a giant water heater, but nicer. And cleaner. A couch, chair, and floor lamp, the shade with miniature red and blue racecars along the edges, framed an oversized rug in front of the window. A Pioneer stereo and turntable sat on red milk crates in the corner.

  “So, you can crash there.” Charlie pointed to the rug.