Banshee. Rachel Dewoskin
I met her? How much of my wanting Leah was about her body and how much about herself, and again, that question: what was the difference?
“Are you two alike?” I asked.
“No. She’s better at everything,” Leah said, because she’s a child.
“That can’t be true,” I said.
“Well, it is.”
This was the sort of thing my half-brother Hank might say about me. I wondered if the cancer would change or punctuate that idea for him, the theory that I was a thieving, attention-stealing winner who took all. I hadn’t told Hank about the cancer, either—how would he be able to bear it if I was the one who was sick for a minute or two? And I couldn’t tell Sarah, because she’d suffer knowing I was sick, which I couldn’t bear. Sarah was the one I told when I decided I “needed” a bra. I was eleven, and she took me on the secret shopping trip and let me choose. She didn’t even embarrass me about my choice: a heavily padded, pink-and-black-leopard-print lace one.
“She’s a musical prodigy,” Leah was telling me about her twin, who was also, apparently, a straight-A student at Harvard Law, and had been an Olympic-level pole-vaulter during high school and undergrad. Did she make the cricket sound in the back of her throat when she came? Would she buck against me the way Leah did? Pin me down?
“It’s tough to compete with someone like that,” I said mildly. “Maybe don’t approach your sisterhood as a competition?”
Leah rolled her eyes. “Well, except we have to compete for our father’s love,” she said.
I laughed and she stared at me.
“What’s your father like?” she asked, as if we were teenagers falling in love.
“I have no father,” I reported truthfully, inexplicably still laughing. “I was conceived in a fit of fleeting passion my mother always described as her ‘feminist’ rebound after my half-brother’s father left them.”
Leah’s mouth was open. I wanted to put my burning fingers in it and cool them, or put them in the collar of her jacket, open her shirt, press my hands into her chest, her stomach. Instead, I stood up. I didn’t care about the thing with my father/no-father; someone else could parse that with Dr. Freud. I had present-tense fish frying here. I hoped she would suggest returning to her apartment, but she saw me stand and said, “I’m hungry,” so we walked back to University Street for vegetarian bibimbap—and then to Leah’s.
She peeled off her patterned tights in the hallway, taking my hand and placing it under her cargo skirt while looking straight at me. I was disoriented by her confidence, and we tumbled into the place unzipping and pushing and falling. Suddenly in her underpants, Leah looked like a rare creature I’d trapped in a jungle somewhere. She took my arm and tackled me onto her futon.
Ah, her futon. On the surface of that flat mattress she pinned and slid up and down me. Somehow, I thought of Connect Four, the little plastic coins sliding down into their proper places, lining up. She was so young and hard and smooth I couldn’t help but wonder for a moment what my body—not bad for a half-dead professor, but still—looked and felt like to her.
Did she see the danger of my age, the slight sag between my breasts and ribcage, the whisper of a C-section scar across my bikini line? What did she make of all the parts of me that made me irrevocably not hers and not available to her? Her tongue was on my stomach, in my belly button, tracing a delicate line down across the scar. Her eyes stayed open, looking up. Was she daring me? I closed my eyes.
When we lay flat across each other later, we were like attached disposable chopsticks. I could taste some outrageous mixture of the two of us and feel all the places she was wet.
“You can stay the night if you like.”
That’s how she put it, stay the night, and I whacked into reality so fast my head hurt as if I’d hit it against concrete.
“Oh, um, no thank you,” I said, and the formality and awkwardness prompted me to continue, so I added that I had to prepare to teach the following morning. As I spoke these words about my teaching, they popped and cracked with the sweet absurdity of candy.
Leah diminished the hilarity, though, when she rolled off me and into her own corner of the horrible futon and responded, “I know. I’m in your class, remember?”
“Of course, right. Well, yes, see you tomorrow.” I almost called her “dear,” but pulled myself together before that happened.
Oh, my silent house, the slip of light under the door of his study the only evidence that Charles was there. In our bathroom, I took my clothes off, stood in front of our giant mirror, and stared. My breasts were tragic in the flattering light, sagging only the tiniest bit, their general curve still round, skin taut, nipples as transparent pink as they’d been when I was a girl. I liked their slightly tired look, the line suggesting a dramatic contrast between breast and rib cage. Leah had touched them; maybe that was why they had a literary, golden sheen. They looked like characters in a novel. I then had the dissociating sense that I was looking at Leah rather than at myself, and found it comforting.
From now on, I would think only of her breasts, never my own, even when I looked at myself. I would think of her nipples, rising to meet my fingers when I made small circles over, across, and around them. Speaking of which, it didn’t matter to me that Leah was a woman, except insofar as she reminded me of something beautiful and important, and I needed to keep stripping naked with her in order not to lose whatever it was forever.
I put on pajama bottoms and a tank top, and climbed into bed with Mina Loy’s Lunar Baedeker, but my mind fell from the lines over and over, as if they were ropes strung too thin and precarious for me to balance on. I could think of nothing but Leah and illness. Well, and death. And Alexi.
None of this—not the affair, the lying to Alexi, or the being alive—was sustainable. Maybe Leah knew that too, but most likely only I knew for sure. Who knew what Leah knew?
Something. Part of what I missed most about being young was the way in which youth made it impossible to guess at the limited outcomes of love. Even if you’d been wild, or been burnt, you still had unbroken hope that the potential endings of each story were limitless. It’s like the difference between having a secret admirer and finding out who it is. When it’s still secret, it feels like everyone—and then when you know who it is, it’s just that one person. And that person who actually admires or loves you? The narrow eliminator of all the other possibilities, crusher of hopeful scope.
So, it wasn’t going to last, okay, that shouldn’t have kept me up, because it was something, at least—for now. And something and nothing were more clearly opposites than I’d ever known them to be, or stark choices anyway.
I heard feet on the stairs—Charles’s—and listened as if I were a detective, deduced he’d made it about halfway, and then the sound stopped. Was he standing mid-staircase, frozen? It would have been so unlike him, any gesture of indecision. All the mean bones in me hoped that my horrible behavior had introduced to him the human experience of not being totally certain all the time that you were right, a tiny dose of crazy. At the same time, I wished he would climb into bed and fall asleep with a book on his face. Or wrap an arm around my neck. Our routines shorted out, just like that, after nineteen years of enacting them until I thought we had calcified into their patterns. Were they gone now, those patterns?
Maybe my fear that the universe would rob me of what mattered most was making me destroy what mattered most in advance, a wildly childish breaking-up-with-my-own-life-before-it-could-break-up-with-me. I never did hear Charles make it up or down the rest of the stairs. Would he spend the night stranded mid-staircase?
I turned the light off and listened to the hum of the park outside our window, wind, the crisp leaves snapping finally and falling slowly onto piles of other leaves, a huge dead salad. I tried to put my breasts far outside myself. Some nights, they seemed small, manageable, a wisp that could (and now would) be swept away; other nights, like this one, they seemed to swallow the rest of me, to be a season, something