need him. Eventually, because remember, he was no youngster, he sold the circus and joined Mimi year-round. The weather in Denver is quite temperate, apparently, even though it’s near the mountains.”
I swallowed my last bite of green beans. “May I be excused?”
“Sweetheart, there’s butterscotch tapioca,” my mother said.
“I have a history test tomorrow.” I stood and kept speaking as I backed out of the room, so that that would seem like the reason I was still facing them. “I need to study.”
In my bedroom, I changed underpants. I didn’t know what to do with the soiled pair—I didn’t want to risk leaving them in the laundry basket in the corner of my room and having my mother find them—so I balled them up and set them in the back of my sock drawer. In the bathroom, before urinating, I wiped a wad of toilet paper between my legs, and the wad came away with a clear, filmy smear. The second time I wiped myself, I wet the toilet paper first. Then I flushed both wads away, as if destroying the evidence could undo the act.
LATE THE NEXT afternoon, when my father was still at work, my grandmother was in the living room smoking and reading
My grandmother looked up. “On the side will be fine.”
I did n’t move immediately.“ Was that story about Mimi Etoile true?”
My grandmother regarded me. “If it were,” she said at last, “don’t you think it’d be awfully interesting?”
THAT WEDNESDAY MORNING, as I ate oatmeal in the kitchen, my mother said, “Spirit Club meets this afternoon, doesn’t it, sweetie?” And though I had not attended a meeting since the accident, I went because of the willed brightness of her tone, the way she thought—it was touching, really—that if we spoke cheerily, it might mean I hadn’t killed Andrew.
It was an ordinary meeting, with a forty-five-minute argument over whether the GO BENTON KNIGHTS banner for Friday’s football game against Houghton North High should be unfurled at morning assembly or withheld until the actual game; I did not speak at all except to vote yea for opening the banner at assembly. Spirit Club was composed of sixteen girls and one boy, a slim, excitable sophomore named Peter Smyth who was obsessed with Elizabeth Taylor and who would, at any opportunity, impersonate her in her role as a call girl in
The next day, I was leaving the cafeteria after lunch when Mary Hafliger, the Spirit Club president, approached me. “Can I speak with you in private?” she asked.
I nodded, and we walked from the noisy cafeteria outside to the faculty parking lot. It was a sunny day, and the leaves on the trees at the parking lot’s edge were red and gold.
“This is hard to tell you,” she said, “but we think you shouldn’t be in Spirit Club anymore.”
I was stunned and also not surprised at all. I expected censure in general, but I was never prepared for it in the moment.
I swallowed. “That’s fine.”
“I knew you would understand,” she said. “It’s just that you make people sad.”
I thought of having defended Mary’s hairy forearms to Dena the previous spring, and then I wondered, had I made people sad at the meeting the day before? It had consisted of nothing but bickering and, at random intervals, Peter Smyth announcing, “ ‘Mama, face it. I was the slut of all time!’ ”
But could I really fault Mary? I was Mimi Etoile, I realized suddenly, I was the girl whose nose had been bitten off by a tiger, and now I reminded cheerful people of life’s sorrow. Or no, maybe I wasn’t Mimi, because she had gone on to find her happy ending. Besides, it had only been her nose.
____
THE NEXT TIME was after school that Friday. He was in the rusty red pickup I’d seen at the Imhofs’ farm, and he’d parked near campus and was sitting in the driver’s seat. When I was right beside the pickup, he said in a low voice, “Alice.” I turned, recognized him, said nothing, and climbed in the truck. We didn’t speak until after we’d made a right into his family’s driveway. I was surprised; without consciously knowing I’d thought that far ahead, I’d assumed we’d go somewhere secluded, that we might even use the bed of the truck.
“But what about your—” I began, and he said, “They’re spending the weekend with my aunt and uncle in Racine.”
In the house, I followed Pete up the stairs; I felt purposeful and not nervous. The first round was like before, both of us on our hands and knees, him behind me. But after we collapsed onto the mattress, we eventually ended up turning over, so we were on our backs next to each other, then he was on his side facing me; because he was taller, his mouth was near the top of my head. This repositioning all took a long time, and we spoke very little. We still were lying like that when he began running his fingers back and forth across the concave dip between my hip bones, his hand dropping progressively lower after each round-trip. When he got where he’d been going, I flinched, which wasn’t the same as not wanting to be touched. He stilled his hand, but he didn’t lift it away, and he didn’t say anything. He was waiting, perhaps, for me to protest. When I didn’t, he proceeded. I shut my eyes. At first my gasps were shallow and quiet, but they grew deeper and louder, and this might have been mortifying if I were still me, if the world still existed, but I wasn’t and it didn’t. I’d open my eyes and see an off-white ceiling, the tops of brown-and-yellow-plaid curtains, and then I’d close my eyes and go back into the roiling blackness of outer space, comets, and asteroids, and then I’d open my eyes again—ceiling, curtains—and the difference was as great as if I’d been sitting at my desk in homeroom one moment and then I’d turned around and found the Great Wall of China stretched out before me. It was not clear whether he rolled onto me or I pulled him, but at some point he was in me again, we were face-to-face, grinding and colliding, and I was gripping his buttocks, and it happened at the same time for both of us, I raised my legs and curled them around his back to pull him as close to me as possible, to make him be as far inside. In retrospect, this whole time period with Pete is so clouded with sorrow and regret that I try not to think of it; sometimes still, it can make me wince. And yet I confess to slight amusement that what happened for us that day in his bedroom, the synchronicity of timing, has never once happened in decades of marriage to a man I love dearly.
Lying there with Pete Imhof, his weight on me as our breathing and our heartbeats slowed, I thought how there was nothing else, nothing on any topic that any person could say. This was the only thing more powerful than grief.
DENA HAD REALIZED that Andrew’s death was an act of God. She told me this while I sat on her bed watching her apply makeup before meeting people at Tatty’s on Saturday night. Several times, she had invited me to go, but I’d declined, and she’d said, “You have to quit thinking about him. Andrew was an angel taken from us
