Sasha’s mom bakes and asks us about boys. She is a guidance counselor at the elementary school and very smart. When Sasha’s sister’s home she sits with us also and often interrupts. They all touch each other. Her sister fixes Sasha’s hair or asks midsentence if she can borrow the earrings that she’s wearing, where she got that sweater, if she thinks the shirt that she’s wearing suits her frame. She gestures often and I flinch when I sit close to her. Their mom looks hard at whichever of us is speaking and when Sasha and her sister fight in their brash, sharp way of fighting, she says, Girls, in this specific, intimate way that both makes them look at each other like she’s being silly, talking to them like they’re children, and also makes them stop, look up at her, say sorry quietly.
Of her and her sister, Sasha’s the more aberrant. She fights more often with their mother. She is the smarter of the two but also the more reckless, the one who needs more guidance, more taking care. Her sister often scolds her in my presence. I think part of what Sasha likes about me is how rootless I am, feral maybe, that she’s the one in charge.
Even though my parents are never home, we always go to her house. My house is so clean it makes the few other kids I’ve had over uncomfortable. It’s big and cavernous, with lots of suede and dark wood. My room is upstairs, down a long hall, my sister’s room down an opposite hall on the other side, and my parents sometimes, if they come home from work and we’re in our rooms, have to call the upstairs phone line to see if we are there.
When I turn sixteen I get a brand-new black convertible, just exactly what I asked for—I don’t know until years later to be embarrassed by it—and Sasha and I drive out by the water on the weekends, top down, sun splotched on our faces, hair a mess. I skip school by myself; her mom has friends who work at the high school and they would tell her. When the school calls to say I wasn’t there, I just delete the message before anybody sees. I drive out to the beach and run, then walk, for hours and no one notices at dinner that there’s sand still on my feet and in my hair. I drive around and cry. My face is swollen in addition to being sunburned and I look straight at my mother as she asks me about my calc grade and she nods when I tell her it’s an A.
Our senior year, Sasha has a boyfriend much older than us all. He is at the community college and in plays. I think he’s awful and then worry I’m just jealous: of him or her, I’m not quite sure. He’s dramatic, gesturing and talking, saying nothing, but she says she loves him. We talk about him on the phone for hours. He gets us stoned on weekends at the beach and convinces us to break in to old hotel pools at night and sit naked in the hot tub, four or five girls and his one or two friends that always tag along—they don’t ever touch me—and he tells us stories about places he says he’s been. We play Truth or Dare and we are told to kiss. She grabs the back of my head and burrows her lips in my face and I breathe through my nose and my hands make small, tight fists.
IT’S FIVE DEGREES so I wear two pairs of tights and two shirts and a jacket that my mother bought me for Christmas that smells because I wear it almost every day. I wear a headband and gloves. There’s a hole in the index finger of my right glove and though every other part of me is covered up and warm my finger is raw and splotched and I have no feeling in my hand when I get home.
* * *
My husband slips in the shower as I stand underneath the spray, cold skin prickling with each drop of heat, my legs and arms bright red. I make a fist and then unfist it over and over, trying to get the feeling back. My husband pulls back the curtain and I have to step out from underneath the warmth to let him in. I put my hand along his back and he gasps and snaps at me and we both shampoo and condition and scrub our arms and legs and faces without speaking, without touching, until we’re out and dry and dressed.
* * *
At work, a woman whom I’ve always liked but don’t really speak to is putting on lipstick in the employee bathroom. How are you? I say, and her eyes angle toward her lipstick and she says, I’m hoping this will pick me up.
Will you teach me? I say, unable, it seems, just to smile. I blame my mother, I think, for my inability to not always try in some way to make conversation out of quiet. I point to her bag. Those bags remain one of the great mysteries of my life, I say.
She laughs.
You don’t need it, she says. She is younger than me, just like every other person who works here, and she is also trying to be nice.
I smile at her and shake my head. My poor daughters, I say.
* * *
I leave after the last class I teach with the twenty-four-year-old, in which he gives a fifteen-minute speech about Brita filters as a metaphor for making edits on one’s papers. Clarity, he says, and purity. The kids’ eyes glaze over and I catch a girl in the back playing pool on her phone but I pretend that I don’t see her and as soon as class is over I grab my bag and coat and take the escalator steps two at a time.
* * *
I keep checking my phone as I walk down Broadway, thinking Sasha might call or text me back. I don’t want her to call me. I use the magic credit card to get more gummy candy from the CVS and one of those tubes of goop meant to put underneath one’s eyes and walk over the Brooklyn Bridge—though I usually reserve the bridge for running—and the last three miles to our apartment as it gets dark and my ears are very cold.
2
IT SNOWED, THEN rained, and now ice has frozen on the sidewalks. I sit up in bed, scrolling through my phone and thinking myself through the pros and cons of going running. I won’t be able to breathe at work if I don’t go running. If I fall and break something, I won’t be able to breathe for months. I put on two pairs of tights and two shirts—one fleece and one thin insulate, both long-sleeved—and the padded jacket my mom got me that still smells. I put the band around my head and I put on my gloves, still with the single hole, and I pull a fleece tube around my neck so I can yank it up to just below my eyes in the moment when I start to lose feeling in my nose and lips. I run in the middle of the road so I won’t slip, as the sidewalks are still slick with ice and piles of snow, and cars drive slowly past the few times they drive past. I see one other person running, a woman, older than me, slowly climbing through the snow piled on the sidewalk, taking off.
* * *
At lunch, at work, my co–homeroom teacher shows me a YouTube video of a black woman prepping a wig and placing it, firmly, on her head. She cuts the hair and shapes it as it sits on a mannequin in front of her. She colors the scalp to match her skin tone with what looks like chalk but my co–homeroom teacher says is not. Her hair is held against her head in small tight braids and she slips the wig overtop and shifts it back, then right, then left until it sits perfectly on her head.
You do that every day? I say, setting down her phone, as she eats the mozzarella sticks that come with French fries that they serve on Tuesdays, neither of which I can quite bring myself to eat.
My friend laughs at me. I stay mostly quiet because I do not want her to stop telling me things like she did this morning: out of nowhere, holding my arm and whispering to me, as the kids filed into the classroom and we sipped our third cups of coffee, You know my hair’s a wig.