With or Without You Page 4

  “Hi!” Blair said. “I found this one meandering along the yellow brick road.”

  “She’s quite good at that.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Meandering.”

  “Aren’t we all,” said Blair. So on my side. “But don’t you look phenomenal, Nancy! Big plans tonight?”

  “Just dinner.” Nancy looked right over Blair to me, which was odd. When it came to talking, particularly about food and restaurants, Nancy was expert. She always said, “You know me, I can do twenty minutes making dinner reservations!” But that day there was no gloss, no cover. “How was camp?” she asked, sarcastic-like, as if she already knew the answer. We’d been waging silent war since the letter from my counselors had come. They said I refused to integrate with the group. Nancy’d shoved the letter in front of me the other night while I was eating cold pizza. “What is it with you?” she said finally. “What’s your problem?” Heat like an electric blanket shrouded me.

  That day I’d waited as two boys and two girls picked teams for a tetherball tournament, and every time someone called a name that wasn’t mine, I stared at the counselors smacking that dumb yellow ball back and forth, dust spreading from their cool leather sneakers and landing in the back of my throat. It was the easiest game, you wrapped a ball on a string around a pole, but my grandmother said those were the best kind. She and her brother had grown up playing kick-the-can and tag. They couldn’t believe it when they’d gotten a ball. Two generations later someone had attached it to a stick. We always wanted more. But there was a rush to the winning whack—that point where speed and strength combined and you slammed the ball over your opponent’s head, sending it coiling around the pole so you barely had to tap it when it came your way again. The laws of brute force were on your side. Like magic. Someone called my name and I jumped up but was shoved aside by another girl who whooped over and high-fived her friends, I think her name was Lydia, and I stood paralyzed like that damn pole, the string coiling around my neck as every last girl, even those with long fingernails and those who forfeited turns for their boyfriends and those who always missed the ball but jumped so high their asses leaked out of their shorts—even they were all chosen before me. Finally a counselor steered me toward team four. “Aw! We didn’t pick IT!” said a boy with a baseball hat turned backwards. My captain. “This isn’t a democracy,” the counselor smiled, and walked away. The boy glared at me. “Mess up and your ass is grass.”

  “More like a whole field,” said a stickish-thin girl, and they both laughed.

  I felt exposed, as if the whole vaporous memory had materialized on a screen in front of Nancy. But when I looked up from the letter she was gone. A couple of days later I’d heard her laughing into the phone, “Of course we’ll be there, unless Lily manages to get herself thrown out of another camp.”

  No way would I give her the satisfaction, even though I hated this camp more than the last. I told her it was great.

  “Really?” said my mother, her nose scrunched up, eyebrows floating above her glasses. Gold dots in the frame. Her initials.

  Before I could tell her how we’d done archery and I’d hit the bull’s-eye and only once had (accidentally, I swear) skimmed the shirt of the skinny girl, Blair broke in. “You heading into the city, Nancy? It’s a fantastic night for it. Just perfect for walking around the seaport or downtown.”

  “We’ll be on the east side,” said my mother. A chill wind brushed through the car, raising the hair on my arms, and I wished I could climb under a thick comforter and shut my eyes. I was so sleepy. The engines hummed even louder. Purring. Like the girls when you touched behind their ears.

  “Well,” Nancy cleared her throat. “I guess I’ll be off … I have to catch the 6:10. Lily, there’s some chicken in the refrigerator. We’ll be home late.”

  “She can eat with me,” Blair said.

  “Really, don’t feel obligated.”

  “Not at all.”

  “She’s good on her own.”

  “It’s my way of saying thanks.” Blair turned from Nancy to me and tapped my thigh. “For me and the girls …” She kept her hand there a few seconds and when she lifted, it felt cool. Right through my jeans. They were cutoffs like she wore on her days off. Mine fell below the knee. Nancy hated them. She never wore jeans, even if they had somebody’s name on the back pocket.

  “Well, then …” Nancy said. “I guess we’ll see you later.”

  I nodded, said bye. Blair said have fun and tilted her stick into first, second. I looked in the rearview mirror as Nancy signaled left and out of sight, and my stomach slowly released. We rumbled past my house into Blair’s driveway, this time sliding into neutral. She shut off the engine. My ears adjusted to the wind, the waves, the cry of a sea gull. “Ready?” Blair smiled. Then popped open her door.

  Outside the air felt heavier. Cooler. Summer nights had the damp chill of clothes pulled too soon from the dryer. We lingered a bit before heading inside. Blair put on the kettle and went to change out of her uniform. I heard the closet slide open, a drawer pull, her feet creaking across the wooden planks, cat claws clicking like high heels behind her. “Lillian,” she called to me. “You can put on some music if you want … or the TV.” She glided into the bathroom, and I heard water splashing in the sink. She always left the door open, even when she peed. Scanning her albums I found mostly disco music. Girls with one name and tons of hair: Donna, Diana, Barbra—the guys at camp said disco sucks but they’d never seen Blair swing her hands above her head as she danced around the kitchen counter, like she felt each beat in a different part of her body.

  The kettle screeched, and I jerked forward. My hands landed in the white shag. I steadied myself on all fours and like a cat leaned into the wall. Blair came out in faded jeans and a pink V-neck. All soft and powdery. Walking by she rubbed the back of my neck and I said, “Meow!”

  She couldn’t hear me over the wailing kettle. “I swear it used to whistle and then one day it became a foghorn!” she shouted, and with her hands covering her ears rushed over to turn it off. I pushed myself up onto the couch.

  Blair brought over the Delta tray with steaming cups of tea, Sweet’N Low, and those tiny containers of creamer. “Let’s relax a bit, then we’ll see about food,” she said. “Are you terribly hungry?”

  “Not really.”

  “Me neither.” She pulled out the tea bag with her spoon and curled the string round and round. Once I’d tried that at home, but Nancy said it was bad for you. You ended up drinking chemicals from the bag and they caused cancer. I didn’t mention this to Blair, who was still wrapping and wringing to get out every last drop. Imagine if I picked up a tetherball and simply walked the ball around the pole, pulling tighter and tighter as I circled, so tight the ball eventually popped like a dandelion head from the string or the pole bent forward—that’s what she liked to do to her tea bags. Squeeze ’em with a slow-mo kind of force. Like what happens when you wrap a thread around your finger. Tension makes it stronger than the skin beneath it. Squeeze hard enough and eventually it’ll slice right through the skin. That’s the thing about slow-mo force: it can be just as deadly, as brute, and even more insidious. You really have to work it. Blair’s tea bag puffed out between the lines. Like a purplish finger, or my stomach around my mother. And then it happened. The string broke through. Little leaves showered over her cup. “Dammit!” she said, and looked close to tears. “My nerves are shot. I need something better than tea.” She stood up and grabbed the genie bottle from the shelf. The label said V.S.O.P. I remembered Jack once telling me it meant Very Special Old Product. It was the only alcohol Blair kept in the house. She took down a fat glass and looked inside. I wanted one, too. And asked.

  “I don’t know,” Blair hesitated.

  “Jack lets me drink from his wine glass,” I said. Not a lie.

  Gustave had told him it was what kids did in France. What I didn’t say was I’d been sneaking sips from Nancy’s gin glasses for years. She left t
hem half full around the house, like she left her half-smoked cigarettes, an offering to some invisible god or ghost. Sometimes I smoked the ends, trying to determine where my mother’d just been by the freshness of a lipstick stain, the size of a remaining ash, the lingering scent of her perfume, and through this put together a life in pencil drawings: Nancy talks on the phone, Nancy watches TV, Nancy supervises the cleaning lady, Nancy touches up her eyebrows, Nancy hangs out in the hot tub.

  Blair tilted her head toward the ceiling, then picked up another glass. “You’re sure?”

  “Totally.”

  “Well, why not?”

  She set down the two glasses on the coffee table, poured one half full, the other less so. She handed me the emptier glass. “Prost! “ she said in a funny accent. “That’s ‘cheers’ in German. I do JFK-Munich sometimes, and let me tell you, you’ve never seen such a clean city. It sparkles like Oz. You’re supposed to sip now.”

  “Huh?”

  “After the toast.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  I did. It tasted like cough medicine only it made me cough “Slowly,” Blair said, and I sipped again, this time feeling the liquid warm the back of my throat. “Very good, Lillian,” she said, and the way she pronounced my name was so feathery, like everything in that house of grays and pinks and whites. I turned my head and came face to face with a poster of an old cruise ship. I was so right: Blair was motion.

  We played a game. I pointed to cities in her Delta book with a ballpoint pen, the kind that clicked into action. Then she took the pen and wrote down words about the city I’d chosen … clean, dirty, small streets, big buildings, museums, cafés, cemeteries. Under her thumb, the pen clicked maniacally and sounded like Morse code. I used to bang out Morse code on empty Coke cans with some kids on another block. All I remembered was S.O.S. I wanted to tap out V.S.O.P. Blair was my very own very special old product.

  She high-fived me whenever I chose Paris or Nashville, her two favorite cities, and I thought, this is what it’s like to be picked first. A warm drizzle of tea leaves. Blair refilled our glasses. She told stories about traveling. She didn’t sound like anyone else I knew, even when her words slurred. I thought it was because she traveled to other countries. After a while, tired from the game, we leaned back and looked at the faces on television. They seemed smaller than normal, but I could understand them better. My body felt warm and tingly and I couldn’t stop laughing. And the brandy’d started tasting really good.

  “Oh no!” Blair said. “I forgot about dinner.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “No. But I promised your mother.”

  “She’ll never know.”

  Blair pushed herself straight up and yawned so big I could see all of her teeth. “Excuse me!” she said. One of the girls—Marilyn, maybe, Grace had the bigger ears—meowed and jumped from the couch. “Then I guess we’d better get you home. Your parents’ll be back soon.”

  “I doubt it.”

  Blair’s eyes sunk.

  “They stay out really late when Jack’s got clients. They go dancing and stuff.”

  “And they always leave you alone?”

  I nodded. “When I was really young I stayed with my grandparents, but they moved to Arizona. Sometimes they let me stay at Gustave’s—that’s Jack’s partner, he shoots the commercials but Jack’s the one who makes everything happen. My grandmother says he could sell oil to an Arab.”

  Blair stared at me, biting her lower lip to hold back the tears. I liked that she was sort of a crybaby. In commercials stewardesses always smiled, in movies they had stone faces. Blair was the real deal. I could imagine her going out of her way to find a passenger an extra pillow, track down a special meal, sneak a kitten on board.

  “It’s not right,” she said. “You’re eleven years old.”

  “Twelve. My birthday was June third. I’m a Gemini.”

  “I’m Scorpio,” she said, then stood up and held out her hand.

  “Come … you can stay here tonight.”

  I followed her into the bedroom, faking a yawn, though I was anything but tired. Blair gave me a T-shirt that said Delta Softball and went into the bathroom to pee. “If that doesn’t fit there’s plenty more,” she said. I’d already taken off my other shirt and slipped Blair’s over my head. I turned and saw her sitting on the toilet. “This is okay …” I stammered. She stood, and before pulling up her pants I caught a look at her bush, which like Nancy’s had all of this stringy hair—Nancy liked to walk around naked after her shower. Air-drying. I didn’t have any hair and decided I wouldn’t. Wasn’t that kind of girl. Blair flushed, splashed a little water on her face, then shut off the light. The bedroom went dark, except for the dim shadow of her Statue of Liberty night-light.

  “You look adorable,” she said and tickled my side. “Now let’s get you into bed.”

  She tucked me underneath her bleachy white sheets with the big cotton comforter we sometimes dragged out when we watched TV, and I remembered earlier in her car, how I’d gotten so sleepy and imagined a blanket settling on top of me. It was a vision, the way I’d first seen her come up from the sea. Grace and Marilyn jumped up on the bed, sniffing around me as Blair slipped out of her jeans and V-neck, stopping every few minutes to sip from the brandy bottle. What happened to her glass? I lifted a cat and she purred. An electric powder puff, cooing … V.S.O.P. … V.S.O.P. …

  Peeking through her white fluff, I watched Blair. Body like a brandy bottle, lips mumbling a song about angels, doing a slowmo kind of dance. She slipped on a silky white nightie. Everything in the bedroom was white and pillowy. Heaven. I laughed.

  “What?” she said.

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re scared of me, aren’t you?”

  She was standing there in a short terry cloth bathrobe looking like she was born for those airline commercials. Hi, my name is Blair and I’m gonna fly you like you’ve never been flown before.

  “Well, let me tell you, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Good, ’cause you’re safe here …” her voice cracked, “and ya know, I dunno … you just shouldn’t be alone like that.” She took a long sip from her bottle and sat down next to me. I was, in fact, terrified. I’d never been in bed with another person. You didn’t get into a bed with someone unless you were married or … maybe Blair and I were going to get married. Stretching out one leg at a time, she leaned up against her elbow so her boobs were almost popping out of her nightie. “Lillian G. Speck,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  She stared at me for a minute, then rolled her head back, laughing hysterically. When she came back up her eyes were all teary. “Do you have any idea how much I hate flying?”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind.” She sipped from her bottle. “I’m sorry, did you want some?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Okay, then, it’s bedtime.” She put down the bottle and snuggled under the sheets. One of the girls lay between us. “Meow,” said the cat, and Blair rubbed behind her ears. “Yes, my good girl …”

  “Meow!” I said, and Blair smiled.

  “Are you my good girl, too?” I fluttered my lips, purring. She stroked the back of my neck. I folded into her body and put my arms around her. She held me tight around my waist, moved her legs against mine, and there was her smell—the brandy, the hair dye, the powder—and there were her hands rubbing my back beneath the Delta T-shirt, her silk nightie soft against my cheek, and the motion, the rocking together as she hummed the angel song softly and wrapped me up slow-mo, tight as that string around her tea bag, and I had a vision or memory, I couldn’t tell the difference sometimes … my parents, naked, with another woman in their bed and they’re touching her body and licking her titties. There’s soft music and Jack’s insect eyes. He smiles, Go to bed, Lily. And they all laugh.

  But that was years ago, before I’d made it into a bed of my own. Blair’s.

  She held me
a little longer, then slackened her arms and whispered, “Good night, little flower.” My head drifted into the crook of her elbow. Like this we fell asleep.

  JACK COMES TO SEE ME WITHOUT NANCY. He says she’s gone away for a while, gone to a place where famous people go to have breakdowns. Jack thought he was famous long before I made us all infamous. It was the business that swelled him, all of the restaurants and wrap parties, the drinking and dancing and drugs. Same shit that did in Nancy.

  Not that my own past is clean. When the lawyers scratch the surface, they find the usual stuff: pot, coke, speed, tranqs, pills I knew only by color, shape, or size, but never heroin. None had come my way. By now, thanks to the witness—the one who claims to have seen the gun—the entire world knows I lifted quite a bit of contraband. Everything from my parents’ scrips to the gun that allegedly killed you. The gun the cops can’t seem to find. My lawyer says the witness is jealous and delusional and would give anything to be involved in such a high-profile murder. Better hope that gun doesn’t turn up, I warn my lawyer. I’m getting wary of his tactics, and my father knows it.

  “I saw the rabbi yesterday,” I goad Jack. I’ve been seeing the rabbi since the priest started bumming me out. All his talk about confessing and following Jesus really meant I had to stop doing Mimi and keep my hands off myself, too. I like the rabbi better. He says I’ll find forgiveness through hard work, discipline, and prayer.

  “We talked about evil.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” Jack says. “You want a soda or something?

  I got all these quarters today.” He taps his fingers on the table and looks over at the woman next to us. She’s squeezing the bones out of her two young children. I imagine the guards prying them apart with a big wrench.

  “He says I should plead guilty.”

  “Who?”

  “The rabbi.”

  The way Jack stares we could be sitting in a ski lodge or at the cafeteria at the Museum of Natural History and about to go home together. I never thought I would see him like this: speechless. He retreats behind his black-Irish eyes, the circles beneath them a deeper purple than the week before.