Daphne_A Novel Read online

  “Um, should I help you to your apartment?” Ollie said.

  “Fourth floor. Please.”

  Once we got through my door, I made a dash for the couch, dropped onto it. My apartment, its familiarity, wrapped around me like an old, soft quilt. Ollie stood on the threshold, glancing around. “When I saw you . . .” He shuffled in place, unsure of himself. “I wasn’t sure if you needed, if you were maybe having a—”

  “Come in,” I said, more composed now. He looked down at his work boots. “Don’t worry, I’m not one of those . . . Actually, yeah, if you could.” He padded into the apartment in white socks, the right one with a hole in it. “What were you doing down there?” I said. “Taking the train, or raising hell?”

  “You didn’t hear? The transit cops shot another guy, some homeless guy they thought had a knife or something. Fucking murderers.”

  “Maybe they were just defending themselves.”

  “You shoot a guy three times point-blank for maybe having a knife?”

  “Were you in one of those masks?”

  “Hell no. If they want to shoot me, they’ll have to look me in the eye.” He was glancing around again: my repro Noguchi table, the vintage Knoll sofa a guy had nearly strangled me over at a Laurel Heights estate sale, the blue-cheese marble countertops I spent half my life trying not to scratch. “Wow, this place should be in a magazine or something.”

  “Tell that to those smug pricks at Interior Life. Shit, you must have to know someone there.”

  “Huh?”

  “How about a glass of Riesling?”

  “Um, if you want,” he said. “Or I could go?”

  “In the fridge, right side. Corkscrew’s in the first drawer. Sorry, I’m going to hang out here on the couch.” Whenever I brush up against a bad episode, I’m exhausted afterward. Worse, all my built-up trust in myself, my ability to manage the condition, drains away, too. Maybe that’s the cruelest part of it; you’re never comfortable in your body, never fully insulated.

  Ollie brought over two glasses of wine. I had to gesture for him to sit. He fit himself awkwardly into the opposite corner of the couch. Though I was always preparing the apartment to be admired, it was odd to actually have company. I smelled him again, a whiff of salt breeze or dried sweat. And that deeper, mysterious thing, too, like an echo across a subterranean lake. “Branzino,” I said. “You like branzino?”

  He looked, understandably, puzzled. “Sure you want me to stay?”

  “The wrong number, that was rude of me.”

  “To be honest, I thought it was about a fifty-fifty.”

  “I should thank you. You are hungry, right?”

  “What happened down there? Was it a seizure?”

  “Polenta and white asparagus on the side? Any food allergies?”

  “Sorry, I don’t mean to intrude, but—”

  “Food first,” I begged. “Please.”

  As I cooked, we creaked our way through forty minutes of conversation: Muni delays, the hierarchy of burrito joints in the Mission. Twice he brought up the protests that had just begun in Wisconsin, but I changed subjects, asked about him. He worked in construction, he said, whenever he could get on a job, filled in the gaps fixing up old radios and gramophones and selling them to antiques dealers. He’d grown up on a communal farm way up in Trinity County. There’d been forty other families, and he’d torn around the fields and the looms and the wellness center with the other kids, playing hide-and-seek and freeze tag. He’d gone to a high school that started each morning with ujjayi breathing, then did two years at UC Santa Cruz before dropping out to spend the next five years roaming, Oregon, Washington State, and BC, reading philosophy and building grow houses, before finally moving down to the city and going semi-legit. “I guess I’ve met all kinds of people,” he said, and I didn’t know if it was a point of pride or a cue to me to divulge whatever kind I was. As I pan-seared the polenta, I found myself distracted by his large, callused hands wrapped around the dainty wineglass. The oil popped out of the pan, and we both jumped back like I’d set off a firecracker.

  “Okay,” I said, “let’s eat!” Ollie took dainty bites, as if at a formal event. I ate quickly, ravenous. He helped clear the table. We stood in the kitchen, close together. The central air ticked on, brushing my steadily warming cheeks. The colors in the room deepened. I gulped my wine and tasted the minerals of the earth the grapes had grown in. We moved to the couch. I scrunched against the arm. He was looking at me with unmistakable intent. Very likely I was doing the same. I went for my remotes. The TV played some cop show, a woman being zipped into a body bag, a too resonant image.

  “I wonder if they do auditions for corpses,” Ollie ventured. “ ‘What’s my motivation?’ ‘Okay, so you’re dead . . .’ ”

  I smiled tightly, turned off the TV, took another gulp of wine, swallowed hard.

  “You okay?” He radiated concern, his special talent.

  “You’re probably a great guy.”

  “You say that like it’s a crying shame.”

  “If you weren’t, this would maybe be easier.”

  “I’m interested in you. I guess that’s obvious.” He blushed to say this. “But, yeah, I’ve been feeling you stressing since dinner. Not saying you have to talk about it . . .”

  “What, dinner? Quite a feat. I think we broke the land speed record for branzino.”

  I blushed, too, my cheeks tingling pleasurably, menacingly. The last guy I met—online, where the people-shopping is less fraught—was handsome in a nondescript, collegiate way, though he wore a beard that made him look like the evil twin of himself. After four very polite dates, I let him make out with me in the back room of Skylark, propped myself in the corner, as rigid as a telephone pole. He tasted awful to me, like body spray and regret. There wasn’t much danger of even a headbob; I was more embarrassed than anything. After thirty excruciating minutes, I got in a cab and never spoke to him again. A week later, he sent me drunken texts calling me “ice queen” and other unimaginative things. That was almost a year ago.

  “I’m up for kissing again,” I said. “Just don’t spring anything on me.”

  “Want me to do a countdown or something?” Ollie said.

  “Actually, that would be kind of perfect.”

  “Okay, then—three, two, one . . .”

  My eyes were closed, but I somehow found his mouth. Mine was constricted in a half-grimace, half-grin. We swiveled our heads this way and that, trying to find the right choreography around noses. My kisses grew more forceful, less precise; I think I kissed him on his eye and, somehow, his teeth. “Oops,” he said but didn’t stop. My fear and pleasure mounted together, but I kept going, too. I felt myself high up, teetering on my soaring feelings, a frightened diving horse, about to take the plunge.

  SEVEN

  TO LOOK BACK ON IT FROM THE CYNICAL REACHES OF adulthood, it seems impossible. But there I am, beaming out of every school photo. The hairstyles change—perms, crimps, middle parts, clips everywhere—and just before high school I start trying unfortunate things with turtlenecks and plaid. But, other than being taller than a lot of the boys, I hadn’t developed quickly enough to draw any special attention. That was Brook’s burden. To everyone in the new, daunting hallways of Arcadia High, I appeared happy and, for a time, aggressively normal.

  In classes, I mostly stayed quiet and wrote papers on which teachers scribbled “insightful” and “Tell me more!” but which, thank God, they never read aloud. Though I’d started to shy away from my late-night Hardy, I still loved English. I thought I might study abroad, imagined myself wandering the cobbled streets of some Casterbridge-like village, lingering in old churches with stained-glass sunlight dappling my face, falling calmly asleep at night, a leather-bound edition of Tess or Jude on my chest, far, far away from the girl who lay tensed up in bed, listening for her mother’s crying, waiting for the tingling to come.

  It hadn’t gone away. Worse, it’d started to creep further into my life. The
slammed lockers or popped lunch sacks—surprise, that blunt force emotion—were already bad enough. Once, Brook rushed up behind me in the hallway and clapped me on the butt—“Yo, sweet cheeks!”—and my chemistry book slipped out of my hands, shooting worksheets all across the floor. In the chaos between classes, no one much noticed, and Brook picked everything up while I just stood there. Maybe she thought I was pissed at her idea of a fond prank. Well, yes, that, too. But from that day I started carrying all my stuff in my backpack.

  One afternoon in Mr. Jukes’s health class, Kyle Magolski, who always sat diagonally from me, started snoring. He was a junior repeating a freshman class, and Mr. Jukes had pretty much given up on him. But that week was sex ed week, when Mr. Jukes put out his “Questions about Intimacy?” jar, an old commercial-size tub of mayonnaise wrapped in construction paper, a slot cut in the lid.

  The way Mr. Jukes used the word—intimacy—it sounded like some uncomfortable, embarrassing disease. “When you have intimacy,” he’d say, “always, always be careful.” I was aware that Brook had been stricken, five or six times even, though she was oddly quiet on the subject. Me, I’d never even had a boyfriend. I’d kissed a few middle school boys, and one tried to fumble off my bra playing Seven Minutes in Heaven at Brook’s and later apologized by buying me a Dr. Pepper. Otherwise my Questions about Intimacy had largely gone unaddressed. As for asking Jukes, with his male-pattern-bald ponytail, Teva sandals, and moose socks, most of us would’ve paraded naked through study hall before dropping an honest question in that jar.

  Which meant that, at the beginning of class, he reached in and pulled out the only question, put there, eternally, by Kyle Magolski: “What is 69?” Jukes read it aloud, his disgust at the stunt, three years and counting, unmistakable. But he so wanted his mayonnaise/question jar to be taken seriously that he answered anyway.

  “Sixty-nine,” he began, “is a kind of oral sex. Simultaneous oral sex.” He drew a 6 and a 9 on the board as geysers of laughter erupted around the room. I let out a little cough-laugh myself, but, actually, I hadn’t known what it meant. Boys shouted it in pep rallies—“Let’s go, number sixty-nine!”—but I’d vaguely thought it had to do with 1969, the Summer of Love, etc. “Both partners give and receive pleasure—the vagina, the penis, or the anus,” Jukes said to additional hilarity. “But, everyone, be careful. Having this kind of intimacy can lead to STDs, too. Gonorrhea, herpes, and, well, you get the picture.”

  Question time over, he pushed on with the regular lesson, the implantation of the zygote. I was still wondering how exactly you went from unhooked bra to sixty-nine. Would it feel good? Had Brook ever tried it? Why did she and I never seem to talk about that kind of stuff? Staring at those two numbers nestled luridly together on the board, I was so lost in my thoughts I didn’t hear Kyle Magolski slip into his strangely peaceable snoring.

  Nor did I notice when Mr. Jukes, without pausing in his lecture, raised his fat teacher’s copy of The Human Body: A User’s Manual above his head. As it smacked down on the floor, Kyle Magolski shot straight up in his seat, his shoulders jerking like a marionette’s. But as he woke suddenly up, I seemed suddenly to fall asleep. Or not sleep exactly. I slumped in my desk, my pencil rolled to the floor, my eyes fluttered closed. The tingling lasted longer this time, fourteen or fifteen endless seconds. It grew more intense, like when I was little, learning to swim in the river and I dove deep, the pressure in my head climbing to a whine. I could hear the other kids whispering around me and felt my cheeks burning. I tried to sit up straight. I tried—nothing was happening. I couldn’t get my legs or my hands under me to push myself back up. I couldn’t even stiffen my back to stop from sliding further down. I felt somehow sucked out of my body, caught in an undertow, kicking and flailing, powerless to get back to the surface.

  Then the tingling faded. My eyes fluttered open. Mr. Jukes stood before me, a skeptical, disappointed expression on his face. Because my dad was dead, a lot of the teachers at Arcadia were “rooting for me.” I sat up, blinked out of a thicket of worry and shame, the 6 and 9 flitting in and out of view. A few kids tittered. But I was lucky. They really thought I was asleep. And sleeping in a blow-off class might have been considered cool. So I’d gotten away with it. But whatever it was terrified me.

  FOR REASONS STILL FUZZY to medicine—it’s thought, it’s fucking thought—my immune system was blasting away at receptors in that mysterious part of the brain where muscle control, emotion, and sleep intersect. Puberty is the common trigger for this catastrophe, and I was dead in the center of that lovely time. Here, then, was another plausible explanation: my period. But the few times I ventured to ask other girls, Brook included, if they’d ever felt anything like my tingling or buzzing, they just shrugged. “Headaches? Sometimes. Who doesn’t?” So I shut up about it.

  But it made me wary. I began to dread the boys who were always marauding down the hall and, accidentally or not, bumping into girls like me. I flinched in anticipation, started to pull into myself, bracing for the next time it came, even if I could never seem to predict it. I learned to act. If I drooped when someone told a joke, I’d make it seem like I was hanging my head in weary resignation at how dumb it was. With my fluttering eyes, boys always thought I was flirting, though I did my best to make it seem like exasperation. When my face went slack, I’d try to turn it into the dead-eyed, sarcastic expression Brook had recently, witheringly developed. We like to think our personalities are something we mold and hone. We think we build our own fates. But, no, we grow like a tree does when it finds itself pushing against a boulder or a street sign or the hulk of a blasted building; we bend and warp ourselves to the shape of the impediment.

  THAT WINTER I MADE varsity volleyball. Through most of middle school, I’d been a gangly mess on the court. Then, in eighth grade, I suddenly became agile and confident. I moved over to middle hitter, grew consistent, even fearsome, with my spikes. And on defense, I was unflinching, reckless. I’d dive for anything.

  At the beginning of the season, Coach handed out T-shirts to all the freshmen on the team. “Pain,” they read, “Is Just Weakness Leaving the Body.” If I kept my head down and drove myself hard, I told myself, I could banish this strange thing that had crept over me. Every time Coach shouted, “Hundred and ten percent, ladies!” I’d bite my lip, another squat, another shuttle run, another push-up. I thought I could feel my Weakness departing, slinking off, moving on to some other, more accommodating host.

  Varsity volleyball, because we’d been to state nine years in a row, packed the gym. Matches were deafening: the pep band blaring, the cheering squad screaming, “Be aggressive! B-E aggressive!” I bounced on the balls of my feet on the sideline. Poets and artists and musicians are supposed to be our elected conduits of feeling, the ones overwhelmed and transported on our behalves. But sport sets off riots, makes grown men weep in public. And that’s just the spectators. The athlete gets it all undiluted and either lets it drive her into frenzy or labors to stay strategically, rigidly sober. For me, the latter was never an option. Stepping onto that court was a pure, liquid high. I glowed with the energy it fed me.

  But once we made it to the quarterfinals, the crowds grew louder, more chaotic. The glow smoldered on the edge of the buzzing in my skull. I’d feel the hesitation creep in during warm-up, that tinge of reluctance when I took a first step, when I swung my body up into a spike or a block. Then, when we came to our match against Thessaly Union, some idiot had snuck an air horn in and kept letting off abrupt, shattering blasts in the middle of points. My nerves were jangling like mandolin strings.

  In the first game, I was flat-footed, just barely getting under my sets. “Daphne,” Coach called out, “look alive!” Briefly I redeemed myself with a tricky little dink that landed right at the feet of Thessaly’s front line. The crowd thundered their feet on the bleachers, the energy so frenzied that, somehow, it made me even more sluggish.

  In the second game, we were up 22–20, three points from taking the match.
The bleachers shook to “We Will Rock You.” Then that idiot started blasting his air horn again. My skull began to fizz. Not now, I thought, please, please. The gym fluttered in and out of view. I’d never felt more electric. But I could hardly keep my eyes open.

  Coach called a time-out, mercifully. “Irvine, you okay? You need something? Drink? Snack?”

  “Don’t know.” Sweat and confusion were pouring down my face. “Ga-tor-ade?”

  “Good, chug some. And get the hell back in the game.”

  I tried to forget the crowd, ignore the buzzing. But Thessaly pulled to within a point. Their hitter put an off-speed at me, thinking I was just a rookie and would fall for it. I went to the net, visualized my next step, saw myself bending into the squat I’d grown so strong in, launching straight up for the block. Just then, a cold pulse went through me. The tingling flashed down to my toes. My whole body relaxed, like that soul-sighing moment, as a kid, when you finally let yourself pee your pants. And instead of going up for the block, I stayed rooted in place, arms drooped moronically at my sides, like I’d just given up. Thessaly’s drive landed just inside the right sideline. “Irvine!” Coach screamed. “What are you doing out there?”

  He benched me for the rest of the match. We won. Afterward, he pulled me aside, wanted to know if I had anything hurting, if I’d pulled or sprained anything. He told me to check in with the doctor, maybe look into some PT. I said I was fine, insisted on it several times. He wasn’t convinced. Neither was I.

  Maybe if I’d learned earlier to quarantine myself from other people’s emotion, I could’ve gone on playing. Or I could’ve pursued the individual sports, the meditative, self-denying ones. My dad had been a champion swimmer at Arcadia, or there was cross-country or track and field. Back in the ’80s, there’d been a pole-vaulter with the condition. When he learned he’d made the Olympic team, he was so overcome he flopped over right on the track. In a way, it must have been a relief when, after all of that discipline, he could let himself just tumble down.