Chapter 5 #12
“You good, Goldstein?” Eliza laughs. Susan nods and Eliza continues, “I’m just so sick of trying to psychoanalyze myself, you know?
So, anyway, then the school caught wind of the photo and called my parents, who sat me down and demanded to know who had taken it, who had sent it out.
But I couldn’t bring myself to tell them it was Kyle, because they would know I’d continued to be around him.
I mean, he’d even been over for dinner with them a few times after it happened.
I just couldn’t explain it, why for so long I had the strange urge to be around the person who had degraded me like that.
I still can’t. So instead, I let them blame me, and then my entire life unraveled.
But even when things were at their worst, it still felt easier than admitting the truth.
I mean, I couldn’t even tell you the whole truth when you asked me about it a decade later. ”
“I get it,” Susan says, and she does.
Teenage Eliza was in a hole and didn’t know how to climb out of it. She was failed by the adults around her who didn’t notice. Who punished her for it instead of helping her.
“Did it make me less of a victim, if I kept going back for more?”
It’s a rhetorical question, but Susan still says, “No, of course not. You were a kid.”
“No, I know. It was just that implicating him felt like it would implicate me, too. So I let him off the hook.”
Before they reach Eliza’s house, Susan says, “So what changed? How’d you decide to stop hooking up with him?”
“You really don’t know?”
“I really don’t.”
“It was the night I met you.”
They’re in Eliza’s front yard now. Graham’s car isn’t in the driveway. A hummingbird dips around them, eyeing the bag of fruit.
Susan’s stomach sinks as she wonders if she’s going to have to let Eliza down all over again.
As if she can read her mind, Eliza says, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to try to kiss you.
But I thought you should know the impact you had on me, in the sober light of day.
Not to sound too earnest, but realizing you’re queer is like being granted access to multiple parallel universes.
All of a sudden there are all these possibilities.
I never wanted to see Kyle again after we met.
I liked you enough—awkward as you were—to be pulled from the hold he had over me. You kind of set me free.”
How odd to think that their mutual desire set Eliza free while Susan felt held hostage by it for the better part of twenty years.
“You could have told me,” Susan says. “When I told you that I came out after we met. On our drive up to Katie’s wedding. You really left me hanging.”
Eliza puts a hand on her hip. “I was trying not to love bomb you. Besides, it wouldn’t have changed anything. It would probably have just made the breakup harder, don’t you think?”
At this, Susan doesn’t know what to say, because Eliza is right.
“And anyway,” Eliza continues, “even though I didn’t want to see him again, it was kind of too late to make a difference.
My parents found out about the photo a week or two later.
Then they kicked me out. So, like, I knew I was queer, and that was great.
I knew I didn’t need anything from Kyle.
But then everything else fell apart anyway. If only we’d met sooner.”
“There are a lot of if onlys when it comes to you and me,” Susan says.
Eliza closes her eyes for a few minutes, as though she’s picturing an alternate life.
When she finally opens them, she looks like she’s made peace with something.
“We don’t have to keep talking about this.
I just wanted to tell you. And now you know.
Let’s figure out what to do with these peaches, yeah? We probably have to eat them today.”
“Thank you for telling me,” Susan says, but Eliza’s back is to her as she unlocks the front door and goes inside.
Susan wipes her face with her hands, her breath coming in shakily. She feels bowled over by what Eliza said. It almost seems like she means more to Eliza than Eliza means to her, which yesterday would have been unfathomable, but today, in a strange and surprising way, makes sense.
Inside, Eliza is unloading the produce into ceramic bowls on the pristine marble counter. Everything in the kitchen is worthy of a photo, including Eliza, whose arms are glistening with golden sweat and sunscreen, though her beauty is no longer making Susan yearn for her.
“So now what?” Susan asks, perching on a barstool. “What are you going to do when I leave?”
“I guess I’ll have to go back to producing commercials and being in writers’ rooms, maybe try to write another feature. Not that I think I have anything left to say. It all went into that script. But what about you? Got any other gigs lined up?”
“Actually,” Susan says, “I had a thought.”
“Tell me.”
“Does Long Island, 2005 have to be fictionalized?”
Eliza freezes, one peach in each hand. “What?”
“I mean, you’re writing about a real thing that happened to you and presumably a lot of other girls. What if we made a documentary? About the aughts, and how all the new technology was fueling rape culture in ways we couldn’t understand yet.”
“A documentary,” Eliza repeats.
Eliza’s eyes fill up with tears.
“No, no, don’t cry,” Susan says, rushing to fix whatever she just broke. “I’m sorry. We don’t have to.”
“No, we do,” Eliza says. “It’s perfect.” She lets the tears spill down her face. “I don’t know why it’s making me weep.” She laughs then. The wind chime sound of her laughter mixed with the tears on her face is like a sun-shower. Like soon there’ll be a rainbow.
If Eliza and Susan are to work together to make something, it would mean they’re creative collaborators, a different kind of partnership than Susan has spent the better part of her adulthood dreaming about. She feels a tingling sensation as she allows herself to imagine it.
If there’s a greater, more cosmic reason she and Eliza keep colliding into each other’s lives, maybe this is it.