Chapter 20 #2
“No one is coming in here,” Eleanor said defensively. “No one is allowed to be in here.”
“I remember,” Kim answered, “but shut the windows. Some people will want to come inside for a break from the heat.”
Guests began to arrive, but we remained in Eleanor’s room. She hated having to greet people one at a time, so we sat on her floor fully dressed and waited. Her phone illuminated with a text from Margaret. We both saw Margaret’s name appear on her screen. She turned her phone over.
“Are you mad at Mar?” I asked.
“No,” Eleanor replied. “That’s a stupid question.
” And then, “A little bit.” She started absentmindedly folding one of the shirts, which I now realized she’d left out to deter her mother from including her room in tours of the house.
Then she caught herself and threw the shirt back on the floor.
“My mom buys me things just so she can show them to other people,” she said.
The party had risen to life beneath us. We could hear the chatter of people and clinking of glasses, cars approaching, and music moving through the house.
“Let’s go downstairs,” she said.
—
Eleanor’s older brothers and sisters had all been charming party participants throughout their shared childhood and adolescence.
Eleanor resented the assumption that she would or could do the same.
Her siblings, after all, had had each other, whereas Eleanor had to diffuse the attention of so many adults on her own, adults who were inevitably too charmed by the presence of a blond daughter.
Eleanor once told me she wanted to dye her hair.
I tried not to look horrified, because mothers, not friends, are the ones who look horrified when you suggest changing yourself.
“Your mom and I have known each other for a lifetime, it feels like,” a woman said to Eleanor, carrying a glass of white wine, in which floated pieces of frozen fruit.
“Isn’t she remarkably popular?” Eleanor said.
Eleanor was suspicious of popularity. She knew that when people liked you too much, they wanted something in return.
“Oh yes,” the woman agreed, and her husband appeared beside her.
“Ellie,” he said, and I felt her stiffen. “How tall you’ve grown since the last time we saw you.” He put a congenial hand on her shoulder that I wanted to remove.
“Yes,” she said. “The last time you saw me was at my sister’s wedding. I was twelve.”
“Exactly,” he agreed with good humor, pleased to have apparently been remembered. “That’s right.”
Adults rarely noticed when Eleanor was in the middle of calling them idiots.
This had to do with her tone of voice, so deliciously deadpan it resembled the version of sincerity most people attribute to teenage girls.
On top of that, her hair, her young attractive femaleness, the approaching precipice of her mature appearance, her parents, her siblings, and her own more accommodating behavior at a younger age—which she now considered traitorous—all conspired to create a seemingly impenetrable barrier to her real personality.
Adults didn’t believe in her bad moods or her sarcasm.
All her weapons, which I so admired, hardly produced the effect their sharp points deserved.
This insensibility disappointed Eleanor, though it likewise permitted her to wield those weapons more brazenly.
I put my right arm around her shoulder, and she put her left arm around my waist, and when the next person to stop us made as though to hug Eleanor in greeting, neither of us moved, and they were forced to shift their weight to retract the gesture.
I gave a blank smile as I introduced myself, which Eleanor caught and mirrored.
“Charmed,” I said in response to their name.
Eleanor squeezed my waist to keep from laughing.
We picked up glasses of lemonade and sipped them on the periphery of the party.
Margaret made my world large. Eleanor made it into a room only the two of us could enter.
It was a room in which Eleanor kept her hand on the doorknob.
I wished she wouldn’t. I wished she’d forget about the door.
“I came in my sleep once,” I said. I spoke in a low but not whispered voice, and I gave her a look that meant, We’re at a party, aren’t we?
She arched an eyebrow. “How did you know?”
“I woke up in a puddle,” I said. “And the feeling.”
Her expression writhed in answer. I waited for her to ask what I’d dreamed about, but she didn’t.
“Now you tell me a secret,” I said.
“What kind of secret?”
“The secret kind.”
I thought maybe she’d tell me about Margaret.
But then her mother saw us and called Eleanor away to speak to some friend of the family.
I could have slid off to the bathroom to recover, but I didn’t want to think about what I’d said.
I hovered nearby in case Eleanor needed me as a reason to end a conversation, which meant that I myself became temporarily available to be approached by other guests of the party.
They wanted to engage me in discussion about what they imagined my concerns to be.
I had to tell more than one person that it was still too soon for me to know where I wanted to go to college. Some asked if I had a preliminary idea.
“No,” I’d say. “No idea at all.”
Because shouldn’t they have known it was rude to ask me to identify my perception of my own intelligence through the prestige of whatever schools I might name?
For what could they possibly do with the information except use it to form some opinion of me?
Could I very well ask them what it was they thought they deserved?
“I actually don’t have a favorite subject at school,” I told a woman who was clearly making use of our conversation as an opportunity to reflect on some moment from her own life.
“I had this English teacher in high school…” she began.
But then, thank God, Eleanor reappeared beside me.
“Sorry,” she said to the woman, and the woman accepted the word as an explanation for Eleanor leading me away, though in reality El had offered none.
She took my hand, and this time we walked through the party as though on our way elsewhere and discouraged anyone from interceding by tipping our heads toward each other.
“My mom had an abortion when she was our age,” Eleanor said, resuming our conversation.
I couldn’t argue—this was a secret.
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Is she okay?”
“Well, it’s been a long time since then.”
“Right.” A warm August wind ruffled our hair from our shoulders.
“I mean yes. She had five kids after that. She had like the rest of her life after that.”
“Did she tell you anything about it?”
“Only that it happened.”
I thought of my hair, scattered in the garden. I thought of Eleanor’s mom feeling afraid and uncertain. Neither seemed possible.
“Was it a girl or a boy?”
“I don’t think she could know yet. Why?”
“I don’t know.” It was what I’d thought to ask. “I left my phone in your room,” I said. “So we’d have a reason to go back.”
“Like, genius.”
We returned to the house through its back door.
In the kitchen, a sweaty guest sat at the counter drinking an ice water.
We moved quickly through the dining room, where Kim was in the middle of explaining a hole she’d cut in a wall to a group of admirers.
We took the stairs two at a time, so we didn’t hear the voices inside Eleanor’s bedroom until we’d reached its door.
“You remember how small their old house was?” They were talking about a house Eleanor had never lived in. “From two bedrooms for four kids to this.”
Eleanor went very still beside me. I put my hand on the doorknob. In her room stood a woman with her arm around the waist of a man. When they turned to face us, the man spilled some of his white wine.
“Shit,” he said.
He held the cup away from his body to preserve his suit. Liquid dripped from his hand onto the carpet. Eleanor looked like she was about to pull a knife out of the air and gut these people, but the intruders missed her expression completely.
“Is this your room?” the woman asked. She seemed startled by our appearance but not embarrassed, as though we were all visitors to the museum of this house, merely arriving at different moments to appreciate a work of art.
“The door wasn’t open,” Eleanor said, but she said so quietly.
They didn’t get it. The woman went on, “We were admiring all the effort your mom has put into this house. I would have loved a room like this when I was your—”
“You shut the door behind you,” I interrupted, and waited for them to understand the possible interpretation of their behavior I was putting forward. Neither immediately moved. “This room belongs to a child.”
Because compared to them we were children.
Finally, the woman turned red, not only her face but also her neck and shoulders. “Oh!” she said. “We weren’t—We’re so sorry.”
While the man appeared to be still parsing my accusation, she yanked him out the door.
Eleanor looked me in the eye for one flaming second.
I couldn’t kiss her then, in the moment of her gratitude, because it would have implied a debt.
Still, I gloried in having chased the trespassers away.
You are who you are for all the people you love, at once.
I was myself for my mother, completely. I was myself for Margaret, completely.
But there was a person I could be for Eleanor that I’d never been before, and I now began to perceive her diamond silhouette, her sparkling hand on Eleanor’s back.
Eleanor ran to get a towel for the wine.
I bent over my bag to retrieve my phone and felt beneath my pajamas for the edge of Eleanor’s photograph.
I’d brought it with me, a reminder to make me brave.