Chapter 8
I’d always known that my mother never planned on being a mother, but for many years our closeness distracted from the fact.
At the beginning of each day, she braided my hair, and at the end, she brushed it smooth.
Once, while we lay in her bed and listened to the rain, vicious like it always was in late summer, she asked me to never grow up.
I promised I wouldn’t in a confident voice, like I could really pull it off.
That made her laugh. Back then, making my mother laugh was easy.
There wasn’t a particular moment when I realized my mother’s love for me had changed, but the knowledge of it underscored everything.
I became attuned to failure and the places it lurked: bouts of silence I could no longer conquer, conversations that ended in shut doors.
She didn’t like that I started to want things other people in my grade had.
I didn’t like sleeping in her bed anymore, listening to her tell the same stories.
Unless it was with great effort or luck, I could no longer make my mother smile.
Worse, if she did smile, it was not a real smile, which led me to believe that her smiles had never been real.
Yet though her love looked different, I knew it was there.
I sensed it in the way she left her door open at night.
Or when she slipped me a tube of her old lipstick, a red so bright I could never wear it to school yet beautiful and once, I knew, expensive.
And I only had to paint something good for her to grasp me tight again.
With time, I grew used to our constant negotiations. And then I became motivated by them.
So I wasn’t telling the truth when, earlier, I told James I’d learned to swim by being shoved in.
I’d jumped. All the parents came running, but my mother got there first. She yanked me out by the wrists like I was something precious, a piece of jewelry slipping helplessly down the drain.
Her grip was tight; she was furious. I’d betrayed her by showing the other parents that I couldn’t swim, but still she saved me, because she loved me.
No matter how things had changed between us, we needed each other.
After everyone had migrated to the hot tub, I jumped in again. My mother didn’t come running that time. She watched as I thrashed, her eyes bright and unafraid, challenging me to stay afloat, which eventually I did.
—
Toward the end of that first week, I stopped thinking about time or place.
Manhattan faded from memory. Lou texted occasionally, logistics over her impending move-out, memes.
I didn’t feel the need to reply. I only checked my phone to see if I’d been paid or if my mother had called, but I knew she wouldn’t. She would not run after me again.
Silver and I fell into a comfortable routine.
We would wake at the same time with the bed to ourselves, James already downstairs making breakfast. Silver never experienced the grogginess that hung over me after waking.
She sprung immediately and impatiently to life, kicking her feet into my ribs to persuade me to play.
With my head still on the pillow, I’d lift and dangle chunks of my hair, which transformed for her into the arms of some threatening creature; she pounced and swung and bit.
James didn’t bring up the pastry incident again, and I didn’t tell him about being rejected by my mother.
I often found him tidying something in the house that seemed to me already clean, his ears free of headphones and a look of perfect calm on his face, or sitting in the backyard with his eyes closed beneath the weak morning sun like an elderly person for whom time meant nothing.
When James went on his runs, I sat in bed and searched for jobs while Silver napped on my lap.
But I wasn’t really searching for jobs; I was using one hand to scroll and the other to massage the soft spot behind her ears, which I came to understand as her happy spot.
When I rubbed it, her eyes would close and she’d purr violently, the vibrations wobbling through my legs.
Sometimes she enjoyed herself so much that her tongue slipped out of her mouth.
I loved when this happened but refrained from encouraging it, wary of embarrassing her.
Eventually, the both of us would fall asleep.
Sometimes I woke to little pools of drool on my pillow.
It was unclear whom the drool belonged to.
I loved pressing into Silver’s belly, which had the jiggly give of a water balloon.
I loved looking at her ears, fuzzed with white fur and transparent when the light shone through, the map of illuminated veins like a leaf held to the sun.
It seemed impossible that such fine veins could hold blood, and yet blood did move through them; her ears were always warm.
I also loved to put my fingers under her nose and feel her little breaths.
I pictured the air sliding through her clean pink lungs and into her brain—oh, the size of her brain—and wanted to cry at the delicate ecosystem of her aliveness. Each exhale felt to me like a miracle.
Most of all, I loved her tongue: a sliver of pink against gray fur, flat as paper.
There was a popular pastry sold at a café near campus called langue de chat, French for cat’s tongue, because that was what they were supposed to look like.
I used to be impressed by them, knowing langues de chat were fickle to make and impressive to bring to potlucks.
Now I could see that nothing came close to the dainty thinness of Silver’s tongue.
I imagined taking Silver to the café and demanding to see their best baker.
I would rub Silver’s ears until she slid her tongue out, then say to them: This is what you’re after.
This is what you must replicate. Admit it is impossible.
It pained me to remember that she didn’t belong to me, not even to James, but to his parents. What could grown-ups possibly know about Silver’s specialness?
Even James, I felt, didn’t understand her.
When she pummeled her legs into him, he simply sat up and patted her, even though she obviously wanted to play.
And when they did play, he did not take her seriously, letting her obtain what she desired without a challenge, after which she became uninterested.
But maybe I didn’t fully understand their relationship.
Silver still pranced toward him each time he waved his finger.
And she loved his smell more than mine. She could spend hours in his drawer, digging her nose into the different fabrics and purring madly, eyes drunken, dribbling dots of saliva on the whites.
When he bounced her in his arms, his smile stretching bigger each time he buoyed her higher, I felt slightly jealous.
I couldn’t tell what I was jealous of. Silver never let me hold her for that long, and James never held me like that at all.
—
James planned an outing to a historical town down the coast, but when it was time to go, I felt very tired and apprehensive of being around other people.
I asked to postpone the trip until he got back from Manhattan next Thursday.
James conceded, crawling under the sheets with Silver and me.
I held Silver’s paw, rubbing the skin-like pads.
She licked the corners of my lips where the remainders of the afternoon’s chicken salad had hardened.
My fingers accidentally grazed James. I was alarmed by the hardness of his flesh. Mistaking my touch for flirtation, James lifted the bottom of my shirt. I felt nothing down there but didn’t care enough to protest.
Silver burrowed farther down the sheets, as if to give us privacy.
Gripped by a stroke of inspiration, I leaned upward, made my tongue straight and erect, and licked James’s lip.
“That tickles,” he said, laughing, and put his fingers on my underwear.
This time, his touch was like an electric jolt.
I rolled away from him and curled into myself at the end of the bed, impressed by my nimbleness.
“What are you doing down there?”
Encouraged by the teasing tone of his voice, I said, “Come get me.”
James paused, then lunged. I dove off the bed. He laughed, so did I. He followed me onto the floor, then made himself big to catch me, spreading his arms and legs out wide like a determined goalkeeper. I slipped off to his side and darted behind him.
I was the fastest creature alive. Giddy with adrenaline, I jumped back onto the bed, keeping clear of the lump that was Silver. James clambered with a flourish onto the mattress, then took one final lunge—I ducked—he tumbled past me and back onto the floor.
I was laughing very hard now, feeling victorious and happy.
Flopping onto my back, I spread out my legs and allowed myself a few victory kicks.
Even Silver emerged to see what all the commotion was about.
Then James pinned me by my wrists to the bed.
He was slightly out of breath, his cheeks were red, and I remembered why our chase had started in the first place.
He put his fingers on the hem of my underwear. I couldn’t help it; I whined.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “You don’t want to?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Oh.” He sat up, releasing me. “Then let’s not.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“No, don’t worry.” Relaxed voice, shrug of the shoulders. “There’s nothing to be sorry about.”
I chewed the inside of my cheek. I believed him, but I was disappointed that our precious moment had been spoiled. I wanted to ask why we couldn’t keep playing just because we weren’t having sex.
But James had already disappeared into his sweater. When he reemerged, he gave me a smile and tousled my hair. I accepted the moment was over and retrieved my clothes from the floor. My T-shirt slid over my head. My heartbeat slowed to its regular pace.
—