But maybe she was remembering it all wrong; maybe there was never a time when a kiss could stun and astonish. Maybe, if she aligned the years correctly, she would discover that while Amit was devoting himself to cross-country running, Greta was contorted (the true contortionist) over the stick shift in her mother’s car, offering an illustration of how to manage a penis inside one’s mouth, and Beatrice was sitting in the backseat, watching very closely. Greta, who now leaned across the tea table and grasped Beatrice’s hand and said, suddenly, “We love you so much, Bea.”
TO BEATRICE’S SURPRISE, Amit liked the crotchless panties. He wore them on his head and danced around the apartment. All of me, he sang. Why not take all of me.
He sang and danced with his eyes closed. He snatched her up, and held her close, and, with a snap of his wrist, unfurled her. She dangled out in space, teetering on her tiptoes, ready to crash into the snake tank—but then he spooled her back in again. Together they danced wildly. They dipped and spun and almost knocked over a lamp. He tried to lift her off the floor, but he wasn’t quite tall enough, so she gave a little push and folded up her legs, and it was nearly the same as being swept off her feet.
Can’t you see, he sang. I’m no good without you.
She hung on to his neck and they waltzed over her pop quizzes. And into the bookcase, where he stumbled, and books toppled, and he pulled away from her, doubled over. She stooped down to help and suddenly he shot up, taking her with him, slung over his shoulder like a squalling child. She flailed and shrieked. Staggering about the room, Amit huffed, You took the part that once was my heart.
With a thump, he deposited her onto the sofa. So why not take all of me?
He then twirled around and lurched down the hallway and out the door. To buy them two bottles of ginger ale.
Beatrice lolled on the sofa and hummed a coda to his song. What luck! What fortune! A thousand blessings had been bestowed upon her. A springy sofa, a clean apartment. A pile of pop quizzes that could wait until morning. A dancing fiancé. An airborne Beatrice. A pair of best friends, and a beautiful bridal shower.
Abruptly, she stiffened. For where was her present? Still perched atop her fiancé’s head. Preening itself. And ruffling its polyester feathers.
And where was her fiancé? Walking down the avenue, with a small lilt, a small stutter, in his step.
Beatrice retrieved her shoes from beneath the sofa and ran out into the street. She looked both ways. She saw a dumpster, a dark alley, and a brand-new van with a voluptuous woman painted on its side. She didn’t see Amit. She didn’t see anyone on the street, as if she had rushed out of their apartment and into her own bad dream.
Her nightmares took a truly frightening turn when she was ten, and her father began to appear in them, to save her. But she always knew, through the inevitable logic of nightmares, that her father would be destroyed, that he would struggle valiantly but to no avail, and that his knees would crumble and his eyes would dim and he might try to speak a few loving, gurgling words to her before he expired. She knew it with an awful, churning certainty. It didn’t matter what shape the menace took: sometimes it was a sticky pink substance that came bubbling under the door; sometimes it was an infernal drug lord, disguised as her principal, who was trying to bring her school under his narcotic control. These terrors were acute, yet relatively benign, as long as she was battling them by herself. Once her father got involved, the nightmares would escalate: for what was more paralyzing than the sight of your father, corroding in acid, pinned down by a pitchfork, drooling and drug addled? In one dream she sat in the back of his car and watched his eyes in the rearview mirror as he slowly melted into his seat.
Beatrice hurried down the street. She passed a ladder, a trash can, a pool of broken glass.
In her dreams, death always took her father by surprise. Even up until the very end, he’d remain convinced of his immunity. With this same conviction he would, in real life, pick fights with fellow motorists, climb up onto the roof rather than call the handyman, and disappear into the wilderness for whole days at a time. Beatrice found these weekend excursions particularly infuriating. What better way to court calamity than canoeing? She had seen movies; she knew about the dangers. The willful rapids, the bears snuffling about the campsite, the invisible parasites infesting the water. Not to mention the belligerent, banjo-picking locals who would immediately recognize her father for the city-slicking, fancy-pants doctor he was. She would try to tempt him with alluring alternatives: “We could go to the mall,” she’d say, “get some of those soft pretzels that you like.” Or she would volunteer to help him load up the car, and then tell him mournful stories about a girl in her class, whose grades—due to her father’s death in a tragic canoeing accident—had experienced a precipitous decline. But these tactics rarely worked.
Her mother didn’t want him to leave, either. She would not make him sandwiches to eat on the road; she would not smile; sometimes she wouldn’t even appear in the driveway to say good-bye. On the weekends that Beatrice’s father went away, she and her mother would catch glimpses of one another as they each stalked about the house in an undisturbed rage. But
