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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Vertigo
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
'Drowning, stabbing, shooting, beheading: the fun is endless' The Times, Best Crime Fiction for November 'Murder, mystery and mayhem wreak havoc in these 15 twisty tales which transform victim into victor' Daily Mail 'It would make an ideal present for a wicked aunt, but bear in mind giving it might be seen as incitement to murder' Sunday Times In the old days, all werewolves were men. Margaret Atwood In this slyly subversive noir anthology, Joyce Carol Oates has invited some of the world's most celebrated authors to take their shot at the patriarchy. Featuring stories and poems from Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Valerie Martin, Aimee Bender, Edwidge Danticat, Sheila Kohler, S.A. Solomon, S.J. Rozan, Lucy Taylor, Cassandra Khaw, Bernice L. McFadden, Jennifer Morales, Elizabeth McCracken, Livia Llewellyn, Lisa Lim, and Steph Cha.
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“Razor-sharp and relentless in their portrayal of life, offering snapshots of dysfunction, everyday toil, and brief joy… Each story sears but does not cauterize, leaving protagonists and readers raw. As Oates points out in her introduction, and the stories hauntingly evoke, noir’s strength has very little to do with man-centric plots and everything to do with female ascendance. Fans of contemporary crime fiction won’t want to miss this one”
Publishers Weekly
“This collection enlivens…flattened archetypes by retelling the noir narrative from the new perspectives of teenage girls, women hired hands, and mothers of children”
Book Riot, included in 9 of the Best Noir Fiction Retellings
“Cutting Edge is a box of dark chocolates–each piece unique–spicy, strange, twisty, and electric–no two tastes alike. Joyce Carol Oates has hand-picked 17 sharp-edged, feminist-flavored tales of crime and mystery. An anthology filled with noirish thrills”
ZoomStreet, a Holiday Quick Pick selection
“This collection is ALL written by women, and they are a far cry from your typically smart-mouthed well-heeled dame”
The Fright Stuff
“This is an anthology of stories by many writers. These aren’t nice stories but they will stick with you. They’ll also keep you reading…”
Journey of a Bookseller
“This collection is exceptional”
Foster’s Daily Democrat
“Women writers of crime, mystery, and noir have been kicking their male counterparts in the keister lately… To be scared, stimulated, transfixed, and entertained should be the motive of any writing. Cutting Edge is perfect reading for those with a taste for the nocturnal”
Valerie Brooks’s Gobsmacked
Table of Contents
Introduction
Female Noir
In the old days, all werewolves were male.
—Margaret Atwood
Is there a distinctive female noir? Is there, as some have argued, a distinctive female voice, differing essentially from the male voice? Neuroanatomists have revealed that the female and male brains of Homo sapiens differ significantly, though not in ways that clearly pinpoint distinctive behavior, and without reference to superior intelligence, talent, or traits of personality. In other words, there are neuroanatomical differences in female and male beings, as there are obvious physiological differences between the sexes, but these differences are modulated by countless other factors— genetic inheritance, familial upbringing, education, culture, environment.
It has been noted that noir isn’t a specific subject matter but rather a sort of (dark) music: a sensibility, a tone, an atmosphere. The stark, stoic melancholy of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. Solitary, shadowed objects in the paintings of de Chirico. Not the bland, flat surfaces of sunshine but the tonal drama of chiaroscuro. The music of Robert Johnson, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Nina Simone. Miles Davis’s soundtrack 6for the French film Elevator to the Gallows. Dark eroticism of the poetry of Sylvia Plath fusing desire, sexual rage, unspeakable longing. “Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights” (Wallace Stevens). The very titles Touch of Evil; Farewell, My Lovely; A Kiss Before Dying; “Kiss Me Again, Stranger.” Not so much pessimistic as starkly realist, free of romantic illusion, expecting the less benign, resigned to the worst. Noir is a populist sort of tragic vision, making of a man’s infatuation with a woman, in traditional noir, something richly ironic, and often lethal—not profound, as in classic tragedy, but a confirmation of the way the (actual) world is: deceptive, punishing. Noir is frequently, though not inevitably, romantic/sexual disillusion, fury. The dying words of Hemingway’s Harry Morgan in To Have and Have Not are sheer noir, despair raised to the level of wisdom: “… a man alone ain’t got no bloody chance.”
As for a woman alone, Hemingway is silent. In noir, women’s place until fairly recently has been limited to two: muse, sexual object. As Edgar Allan Poe noted, “The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”
Honoré de Balzac remarked that behind every great fortune there is a crime. Certainly, behind most great works of literature there is a crime, or crimes—the rich, fecund soil in which noir flourishes. In our present-day American republic, in an era of scarcely concealed public corruption and unrepentant scandal, noir seems to have spread like minuscule drops of anthrax in a reservoir.
What is distinctive about female noir isn’t likely to be an identifiable prose style, nor even a prevailing sensibility, but 7rather perspective: where the noir tradition in American fiction and films has been predominantly male, our perspective has been male-directed; in female noir, we are allowed to see, with a good deal of individual variation, from the point of view of the female observer, actor, agent. Suddenly, the male becomes the object of the protagonist’s gaze, which happens to be female. (Though some female observers in Cutting Edge apprehend female from the perspective of the lesbian gaze, as in Aimee Bender’s homage to Raymond Chandler/LA noir in her teasingly erotic “Firetown.” In Jennifer Morales’s “The Boy without a Bike,” the lesbian perspective, which doesn’t shy away from a confrontation with [male] physical violence, comes to include the tenderly maternal and protective as well.)
What has long been an accepted cultural phenomenon, as embedded in the natural order of things as the physical body itself, is revealed by the female gaze as culturally determined, and therefore mutable. It’s true, the great works of American noir have primarily been by men—from Chandler’s The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest, James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, to such film classics as Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, They Drive By Night, They Live By Night, Laura, Vertigo, and countless more, encoding the femme fatale as the driving force of evil; even works of mystery and detection by women writers (Agatha Christie, P.D. James, Ruth Rendell) continued the tradition of the brilliant (if flawed) male detective. Angela Carter’s radical interpretation of the fairy tale, The Bloody Chamber (1979), marked a dramatic turn in literary fiction, in Carter’s ecstatic celebration of the very evil of the female, where once such energies had been the unique property of the male. Though there had been evil female characters previously in literature, 8from murderous Medea and Clytemnestra to savage Goneril and Regan and (more recently) insufferable little Rhoda Penmark of William March’s The Bad Seed and the more piteous psycho-murderer Merricat Blackwood of Shirley Jackson’s WeHave Always Lived in the Castle, it is in the second half of the twentieth century, with the rise of feminism, that the female vision, in its appropriation of the energies of male evil, is in itself celebrated.
As the inscrutable narrator of Valerie Martin’s “Il Grifone” boasts: “Murder is my métier … I made my living spinning plots.”
If the werewolf has been a cultural archetype embodying man’s animal nature in its most obvious, literal manifestation, it is also the case that, until recent times, as Margaret Atwood observes in her poem “Update on Werewolves,” the werewolf was perceived to be an exaggeration of maleness. To be female was to be “feminine”—passively vulnerable to harassment and victimization by men; “femininity” could not be equated with a murderous animal nature. (By literary tradition, vampires could be either male or female: Count Dracula is the vampire patriarch, but he has several vampire-wives who are eager to do his bidding and infect men with the vampire curse; Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, which in fact predated Bram Stoker’s Dracula by twenty-six years, introduces a highly erotic, seductive female/lesbian vampire who never repents her evil behavior.)
Gender divisions in art are futile to debate, though there is a common-sense likelihood that subject matter is often more clearly aligned with one sex than the other, if one acknowledges the binary nature of sex. (In our time, in some quarters, biological identity at birth is no longer considered 9permanently binding: one can “transcend” one’s birthright.) Childbirth, nursing, the travails and ecstasies of inhabiting a female body, experiences of sexual harassment, abuse, exploitation—these are likely to be female subjects, of course; yet, the great American photographer Margaret Bourke-White ventured into such pits of horror as the Buchenwald concentration camp to take photographs for Life at the end of World War II, an assignment that few male photographers might have been capable of undertaking; and the contemporary Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård, in his six-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle, tracks the domestic life of a father with young children in its exhaustive domestic particularities as few women/mothers would have the patience to do. These extremes may be anomalies but they certainly challenge the conventional patriarchal wisdom that “anatomy is destiny”—still more, that “a woman’s place is in the home”—or Robert Graves’s churlish remark, “… woman is not a poet: she is either a Muse or she is nothing.”
It is a curiosity that “mystery” is usually associated with crime, and crime invariably with murder, when in fact mysteries abound in our lives that may have nothing to do with crime, nor even with physical distress. So, too, noir may be about subjects other than crime; yet in literature and film it is invariably associated with crimes, usually murder; in classic noir, the crime (murder) springs from a male protagonist having been tangled in a web spun by a femme fatale, herself heartless. The femme fatale inspires desire in the male but is herself immune to such weakness, which makes her a monstrous being, usually in proximity to a “good” woman—Marilyn Monroe in Niagara, the brazen platinum-blond beauty in contrast to the unspectacular young wife played by 10brunette Jean Peters; Kim Novak in Vertigo, a platinum-blond enigma in contrast to the plain, mousy “good girl” artist played by Barbara Bel Geddes. It’s significant that the Hollywood noir film that most realistically (and sympathetically) explores the consequence of sexual violence against women is Ida Lupino’s Outrage, a portrait of a young woman rape victim in which there isn’t the slightest suggestion of blaming the victim or suggesting any sort of complicity with the rapist. Outrage evokes genuine terror as the victim is stalked by her rapist in a German expressionist cityscape which traps her as in a maze, and explores with remarkable subtlety and candor the struggle of the young woman to regain autonomy over her shattered personality. Here is a noir film in which the female protagonist emerges as the heroine of her own life—a film so far ahead of its time, it remains relatively unknown to this day.
More frequently, films in which women are sexual victims have been carefully contrived revenge dramas in which a heroic male protagonist, likely to be a husband or lover, reverts to vigilante justice after a girl or a woman has suffered violence; the female is the narrative pretext for the male struggle with another male, or males, for dominance. From The Searchers to Death Wish, from Straw Dogs to Memento, this cinematic category is inexhaustible, and contains much that is excellent as well as much that is cheaply exploitative. What the revenge films have in common is the enraged male perspective, which justifies whatever violence is unleashed.
The particular strength of the female noir vision isn’t a recognizable style but rather a defiantly female, indeed feminist, perspective. Cutting Edge brings together a considerable range 11of twenty-first-century female voices, from sociological realism (Cha) to Grand Guignol surrealism (Oates); from erotic playfulness (Bender) to dark fairy-tale determinism (Khaw). Here is a brilliantly deadpan graphic story by Lisa Lim, and here are brilliantly executed poems by Margaret Atwood. Artwork by Laurel Hausler is striking and original, sinister and triumphant; Noir Dame (on the front cover) is the perfect image of a mysterious beauty, far more than merely skin-deep, and essentially unknowable.
As one might expect, a number of these stories wreak vengeance upon the opposite sex. The adolescent protagonist of S.A. Solomon’s “Impala” is a victim of sexual abuse by a high school boyfriend/gang leader from whom she must flee to save her life; in a narrative of steadily mounting suspense, she confronts the prospect of further violence from a stranger encountered on her runaway flight. The mystery-writer protagonist of Valerie Martin’s “Il Grifone” is threatened by a brute (“Half eagle, half lion; on the ground, in the air, all predator, all the time”) whom other men, including her husband, can’t seem to take seriously, even as the reader identifies strongly with her predicament, and thrills to the ingenious way she eludes what might have been a sordid fate: “I’m much less likely to commit a crime because I’ve thought about all the ways it can go wrong …” Martin is particularly adroit at presenting the maddening complicity of men with men—the assumption that a threatened woman is imagining things, even on the part of “sympathetic” men.
In the structurally inventive “A History of the World in Five Objects,” S.J. Rozan tracks the ritualistic behavior of a woman who has survived a traumatizing childhood only to be confronted with the ruins of her personality as an adult. 12In an artful variation on the theme of revenge, Steph Cha’s “Thief” dramatizes a domestic, familial quandary in which tragic loss and betrayal yield to a kind of forgiveness; of necessity, an older generation yields to a younger, for whom life in Koreatown is fraught with more danger than the narrowly virtuous law-abiding elders can imagine.
“Death always made her hungry” is the heart of Lisa Lim’s deftly narrated graphic tale “The Hunger”—a thoroughly unrepentant revenge against another sort of enemy, one within the family. Lucy Taylor’s conversational, confiding “Too Many Lunatics” and Livia Llewellyn’s coolly narrated “One of These Nights” present deceptively reasonable, ostensibly sympathetic female characters who are revealed as more complex than the reader has suspected: in “Too Many Lunatics,” a half sister is determined to save her addict-sister from harm, with unanticipated consequences for both of them; in “One of These Nights,” the sinister alliance between two teenage girls and the father of one of them is only gradually revealed, with unanticipated consequences for a third girl. Edwidge Danticat’s “Please Translate” is a small masterpiece of suspense that has its roots in the classic noir situation in which a woman and a man are locked in mortal combat over the (literal) body of their child, a hostage to adult infidelity and selfishness; in “The Boy without a Bike,” a concerned woman dares to monitor the behavior of a possibly abusive father, imperiling herself even as she exacts revenge upon him.
In Elizabeth McCracken’s mysterious tall tale, “An Early Specimen,” set in an idiosyncratic taxidermy and waxworks museum in Florence, a chronically dissatisfied tourist, an American woman, makes a startling discovery—in fact, two discoveries; her story ends as mysteriously as it begins, as we 13are left with the haunting query the woman has posed to herself—“How would you like to die?” Playful, too, though fueled by a scathing satiric vision, Bernice L. McFadden’s “OBF, Inc.” portrays a society so thoroughly imbued w ith racism that an ingenious entrepreneur has commercialized it as public-relations damage control. Here is an insidious political noir in which the targets of racism can profit from it, if they are willing to sell their souls to be identified as the “one black friend” of racist clients: “We live in America, this is a capitalist country, and we monetize everything. Everything.” In the third year of the Trump administration, very little in McFadden’s American dystopia is far-fetched.
Aimee Bender’s lyrically narrated “Firetown” shimmers in a Los Angeles heat wave as a female private investigator becomes involved with a glamorous wealthy client whose husband (and cat) are missing; wife, husband, husband’s secretary, and the female “private dick” become caught up in a complicated erotic conflagration, with a wonderfully ambiguous ending.
Similarly, in “Miss Martin,” Sheila Kohler’s portrayal of a daughter victimized by a charming predator-father is given an inspired turn by the intervention of a unique female presence, a kind of Mary Poppins dispenser of justice—“the perfect secretary, remembers everything, but is utterly discreet, always there when you need her; never there when you don’t.”
Margaret Atwood, creator of the iconic The Handmaid’s Tale, as well as more recent environmentally engaged works of fiction (the MaddAddam trilogy, The Heart Goes Last), began her career as a poet in the 1960s, in Ontario, Canada; these tersely witty, savagely comic poems are critiques of both patriarchal culture and the strategies of survival by which women accommodate themselves to it in a (seemingly) post-feminist 14era in which “Everything’s suddenly clearer, though also more obscure.” In the twenty-first century, women’s self-empowerment is in danger of becoming merely gestural, stylized and appropriated without being truly realized, as in fantasies of female autonomy that dissipate in real life when they return to “middle-management black and Jimmy Choos.” The poet has no illusions about her role in a world of “moon phases fading to blackout”—“cursed if she smiles or cries.” Cassandra Khaw’s “Mothers, We Dream” is a captivating tale of seductive sea creatures that claim human husbands, which unfolds like a dream, as in the darkest of fairy tales; only belatedly does the husband think “to ask his wife what she was …”
Last in the collection, my own story “Assassin” is, like Khaw’s, a surrealist excursion into the dark places of the (female) heart. An outspoken woman, a woman no longer concerned in the slightest with presenting herself as attractive to anyone, of any gender, realizes that her redemption will be through an act of assassination, in a cause she perceives to be worthy of self-sacrifice: decapitation of a powerful (male) politician. Taking possession of the severed head, the assassin is (re)possessing her own dignity: “I am thinking, and when I am finished thinking I will know more clearly what to do, and I am not taking bloody orders from you, my man, or from any man ever again.”
As in a choral affirmation of female autonomy, female self-identification, and female self-possession, the voices of Cutting Edge concur.
Joyce Carol Oates August 2019
Part I
their bodies, our selves
One of These Nights
by Livia Llewellyn
Nicole’s father doesn’t say a word when he drops us off at Titlow Park, and that’s fine with me. Mr. Miller’s car is hard and lean and long, with dents all along the side and a giant rusty grille in the front that looks like a monster’s grin. His car looks like the kind that would roll down the streets at night all by itself, latching onto you with its lidless glass eyes and running you down like the neighbor’s mangy dog, backing up over and over again until there was nothing left but a sticky red smear on the blacktop. His car reminds me of him.
“Time to get wet,” Nicole says.
I peel myself off the sticky leather and lurch out of the car and into piercing summer sun and noise, the sounds of a hundred kids shrieking and thrashing in the park’s Olympic-sized pool like they’re being murdered. From the other side, Nicole unfurls into the humid air, all long, tanned limbs and bikini-top ties, the tips of her black curls wet against her neck from heat and sweat and coconut oil, from secretions of adulthood that still haven’t settled over me. I don’t understand how she can look so much older, when we’re both fifteen. I’m not exactly a kid myself, but the way she’s moving forward, I’ll never catch up. Then again, I don’t have a father 18like hers to get me there. I have to do everything myself.
“Can I have a dollar for the vending machine, Daddy?” Nicole asks, swaying her body back and forth as if she’s still five. She lets the last word drawl and drip out of her mouth, just like I’ve heard her mother do when she’s drunk and itching for a fight.
“Ask your little friend Julie. I already gave her all my spare change.”
Nicole’s fake smart-ass smile vanishes. Some other type of smile takes its place, and it’s real. “I know,” she says.
Mr. Miller sneers at her, then flicks his cigarette ash out the window. “You know nothing.” Soft gray flecks drift onto Nicole’s face.
“You know what’s going to happen, don’t you.”
Mr. Miller shrugs. “Do what you gotta do, Daughter. You know you want to.”
“Come on.” I tug at Nicole’s arm, then touch her tote bag, so heavy it doesn’t move. She looks at me, then stares back at him with those same pale green-gray eyes that are in his worn, fox-sharp face. After a second, she slowly walks away. I hook my thumb in the belt loop of my shorts and lean forward slightly, my face hovering just outside the window. He can see right down my top.
I give him my most earnest, respectful gaze. “How about that dollar, Mr. Miller?”
He smiles at me, a wide grin that makes lips curl up like he’s pretending he isn’t smelling something bad. “Is that all you want from me, honey?” he says, plucking the cigarette out of his mouth. “’Cause Julie asked for more than that, and I gave it to her. I can give you some too.”
I lean in closer. “Right here, Mr. Miller? You can’t wait?”
19“Can you?” He drapes his hand out of the car window, and his thick fingers hang in the air, moving back and forth in front of my breasts as more ash floats from the red tip. A few flecks catch against my skin. He’s waiting for me to say it, beckoning it out of me with those rough hands.
A soft pop escapes my lips as they part. But nothing else comes out of me, all my thoughts have gone fuzzy red, and suddenly like thunder the car is rolling across the blacktop, so fast and loud that I jump back in fright. He’s gone just like that, out on the road and leaving me behind in a shimmering sea of cars, mothers snarling and tut-tutting at me as they rush their kids past. I don’t know why they’re glaring at me. I don’t control what he does. Most of the time.
I make my way across the lot over to the low building. Paint bubbles and peels off its concrete sides in fading aqua strips, and grime streaks the glass double doors. Above the entrance, fading brass letters read, TITLOW PARK POOL, but it’s clear that some of the letters have been vandalized and replaced multiple times—LOW is spelled with much shinier metal, making the TIT that much more noticeable. Like everything in Tacoma, it’s seen better times. I like it this way.
Julie Westhoff hangs outside the doors, staring at her reflection in the filthy glass as she sprays something on her long pink tongue. Julie thinks she’s more Nicole’s friend than I am; even though I knew Nicole first, Julie quickly took her place as the favorite, and treats me as the interloper with the quiet confidence of girls who always look like her. Thin and blond and pretty, always wearing low-cut blouses and halter tops with open spaces that travel down forever. So cool, she’s not even a cheerleader, instead standing on the sidelines at pep rallies and games, making all the other girls lose their shit 20as she leans against the railing and slowly plays with her hair. She’s the kind of girl Nicole and I used to wish we could look and act like—above it all, never letting anything get under her skin. It took us awhile to realize there’s a world of difference between looking that way and being that way, and we had it going on long before she came around.
“Where’s Nicole?” I ask.
“Somewhere, I don’t know, she disappeared around the corner. She’s pissed at me, or life. I don’t know.” Julie lets out a small, satisfied sigh as she inspects her face. It always makes her a little satisfied when she thinks we’re miserable.
“Is this about her father? Did you two—did you and he …” I let my voice trail off.
Julie’s eyes narrow. “What the fuck are you talking about? I don’t even know him.” She looks down at her hand, at the small cylinder rolling between her fingers.
“Really.”
“Really.” Her voice has turned steely, meaning the conversation is over.
“New poison?” I ask.
Julie points the spray at me. “Open your mouth and find out.”
I know my place in the Bermuda Triangle of our relationship. I open my mouth. Julie squeezes the bottle and mists my tongue. A powerful scent of mint hits my nostrils before I taste it, and a small uck escapes the back of my throat. Julie started smoking like a chimney when she turned twelve and got boobs, so it’s pretty strong. She’s probably swallowed her weight in breath freshener by now.
“I thought you didn’t like mint.”
“Not at first. But the taste goes better with coffee.” She 21tosses the bottle into her tote bag and gives me a smile and a wink. “And urine. You’ll see.”
I laugh. “I don’t drink urine, you freak.”
“If you swim in that pool you do.”
“Funny.”
We follow a group of parents and their kids through the doors. I can’t help but frown at the familiar, nauseating smell of chlorine. We haven’t even gotten to the dressing rooms yet and already it clogs my lungs, slowing my movements and weighing me down. It’s the smell of my childhood, of graceless flailing, of choking, of always fighting the sensation of sinking into oblivion. Back in ’68, the year I turned five, some Tacoma chick won three medals in swimming at the Olympics. By the next summer every mother in the city was dragging her daughter here for lessons, and every summer after that was spent struggling in the lanes of the competition-sized pool, swallowing great gulps of warm chemical water as we thrashed our way through the four-hour sessions like drowning cats. Every summer at least one kid drowned or got sent to the hospital, and they still kept pushing us into the bright blue water, hoping for one more girl who’d bring home the gold. Mom finally stopped taking me when I got my first period and threw a huge shit-fit about wearing a bathing suit with a big old brick of wet cotton between my legs. But I think she was tired of driving all the time, and I was never a good swimmer, anyway. Nicole was the good one. All I learned how to do was hold my breath underwater until the instructors forgot about me or left me alone. It’s been a little over three years since I’ve been here. Nothing’s changed.
Well, a few things have. We pay our entrance fees, then make our way into the women’s changing room, echoing with 22high voices and laughter, the slap of bare feet and shower water against tile, the metallic bang of locker doors. It smells the way it always has, like perfume and soap and damp crotch, but the rooms seem smaller and dingier than I remember, and so many girls look younger. As we strip out of our clothes, I catch a girl I recognize from the seventh-grade class staring at me, then some kid on the bench beside her giving me the eye, super young, maybe ten. I realize with a slight start that I’ve become the unsettling older creature the younger me always wanted to be. The kid’s eyes are round and startled as she stares at our naked bodies, at our breasts and the dark hair between our legs. That’s how I used to look at the older girls when I was a kid. Those are women, I would think to myself. I’m going to be one of them someday. And now I am.
“Nicole still isn’t here,” I say as I set the numbers spinning on the lock. “Did you see her come in?”
Julie makes a sniffing noise. “Maybe she’s not coming? I don’t really care.”
“Did you two have a fight?”
“I’m not fighting with her. She’s fighting with me. It’s more of a disagreement, really. You know what she’s like.”
“I don’t know, it doesn’t sound like her. What is she disagreeing with you about?”
“My rightful place in the world.”
I almost laugh out loud—that phrase is so Nicole. “And your rightful place is …”
“The one place she can’t go.”
“There are always places we can’t go. Until we do.”
“That’s not true. You know what I mean. You’ve seen how she looks at him. She’s just jealous of me. Because I can do what she can’t.”
23“I thought you said you didn’t know him.”
“Well.” Julie smiles and rolls her eyes. “Maybe.”
“Maybe what?” I stare at her like I don’t know what she’s talking about, but she only raises her eyebrows and sniffs, gives me that old you couldn’t possibly understand look, then picks up her towel.
“Ready?” she asks.
“Always.”
We make our way through the maze of rooms and into the blinding gold of a late-afternoon sun. It looks exactly the same—the pool seems to stretch on forever, and there’s movement everywhere, water and waves and limbs all vibrating and shimmering. Oscillating—a word I remember from science class last year. Past the chain-link fence surrounding the pool, the green grass of the park rolls in low waves around a small lake to thick rows of evergreens. Black cables pierce through their branches, converge around high telephone poles, dash across train tracks that line the entire coast. Beyond that, the smooth-pebbled beach and the dark-blue waters of the Sound, which look so warm and inviting and are only ever cold.
“Jesus Christ, this pool is big. Look at all these kids—and their parents, my god. Everyone’s so fat and old.” Julie’s eyes are covered in glasses so dark and large, she looks like an insect. “Why are we here again?”
I shrug. “I met Nicole here—did she tell you? We used to swim here every summer. Four hours a day, five days a week, every June and July for eight years. It’s like, this is what summer is to us. It’s our ritual.”
“Ugh. You are so suburban.”
“It wasn’t that bad. The lifeguards are handsome—look at him.”
24“I guess. He’s kind of … What the fuck? How did she get here before we did?”
Julie points to the far opposite corner, to Nicole’s slender body wrapped around the base of the lifeguard chair, her wet figure curved against the thick steel poles, her lips moving silently. She’s watching the divers at the deep end plunge in, disappearing in one spot and reappearing elsewhere, breaching the surface like miniature whales. The Selkies, that’s what they used to call Nicole and me.
“Come on.” I lead Julie through clumps of bodies, past the shallow end where groups of parents form protective rings around their toddlers and first-graders, and then down the long side of the pool. I watch the numbers painted on the concrete beneath my feet and just underneath the surface of the water grow larger. It was somewhere past the middle that Nicole and I became comfortable over the years. The shallows are too supervised, and the deep end is for divers, and too empty. The middle is both crowded and deep, but most of all it’s deceptive. It’s where you can get lost if you become unsure, or if you’re overconfident and think you can easily get back to the walls. It’s not for amateurs—you have to spend a long time there to learn how to make it all the way back.
“You don’t have to swim, you know,” I say. “It’s fine to just hang out along the side.”
Julie’s grown a bit more quiet than usual, her fake adult face wrinkling a bit with anxiety or worry, although it’s hard to see it under those massive shades. “I know. It’s not that I’m against swimming, it’s just,” she makes a circular motion about her face, “none of this is waterproof. I don’t need to look like Alice Cooper, you know?”
25“That’s fine. We can just hang out by the wall and stare at the guys in Speedos. Like that one.”
Julie shrugs. “I’ve seen bigger. I’ve had bigger. Is Nicole talking to herself? What a psycho.”
