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At the science fair, Kimmy and Jason had touched each other with total ownership, like it was just a given that they had access to each other all the time. At one point I saw him lift her hand and place it in his palm and study it like it was a precious jewel. I’d never had anything like that. I’d graduated from high school, gone to college, graduated, gotten my first job, and I’d still never had anything like that. Not even close.
“So good,” said Jessica. “So hot.” She looked at me for a reaction.
I swiveled around and stared at the empty town center. Sometimes, thinking about those two—Kimmy and Jason—I felt a sense of loss in my own life so drastic it was like the wind was knocked out of me.
“You want to come out tonight?” said Jessica. “We’re going to this new place.”
“No,” I said quietly. I turned back around. It’s funny how a decision you’ve been making in difficult increments can suddenly seem like the simplest thing in the world. “I’m leaving.”
“What?” She looked at me, perhaps for the first time, with genuine interest.
“I’m quitting,” I said. “I’m quitting this afternoon.”
“You are?”
“Yes.”
“Awwww,” she said, staring at her fingernails, a million miles away.
It hadn’t always been like this. Before I got the job at Quartz, before I moved from the Southwest to the East Coast, into an apartment complex that was next to a glinting four-lane highway and had a view of a storage center, before all that I’d been a competitive swimmer. I’d started at the age of twelve, when my mom signed me up at the pool so I’d have something to do while she was at her GRE prep, and I immediately found I had a knack. I remember thinking, This is all you have to do? Just try to keep pushing as hard as you can against the water? Stretch your arm farther than you did the last time and keep doing that? I kept going because I was encouraged and because I became addicted to the approval I saw in the eyes of my coach. I had an instinct, too, that I noticed others didn’t have: how to time your first kick after a turn, the arc you sculpt with your hands in the water to get the most pull, minor adjustments that give you just enough of an advantage. I just knew what to do and it felt good.
By the time I was thirteen I was a two-time record setter at the Junior Nationals. I went on to get second and third place for the backstroke at the Nationals in consecutive years. I competed internationally, and when I was only sixteen years old I was ranked sixth in the 100-meter breaststroke at the World Championship Trials in Buffalo. Do you know what that’s like? To be sixth best at something in the whole world? I’d lie in bed and think about it. Sixth. The sixth fastest female swimmer under the age of eighteen. When you took into account the caprice of fate, the random way things jumbled and settled, couldn’t sixth, in another variation of the universe with slightly reassembled factors, have been first? Maybe I could have ranked higher—if it wasn’t for a kink in my shoulder, and a determination that unexpectedly caved in, one regular morning at college.
It was a Wednesday my junior year at Arizona State, where I was on a full athletic scholarship. I was sitting on the bench, waiting for Coach Serena to write the day’s practice sets. I had a queasy-sick feeling from being up so early, something I’d experienced since high school and never been able to overcome. I was in a daze, licking my thumb, staring at the way my thighs pooled on the wooden bench. My shoulder had been clicking. It was a small feeling, something minutely out of place when I brought my arm above my head. I thought it had to do with the angle of my palm in the water and so that week I’d been trying to adjust my stroke. Candace Lancaster was next to me, her head between her legs. I looked at a poster (“LET THEM EAT WAKE”) on the wall of the pool room and contemplated whether I should stop by the cafeteria on the way back to my dorm after practice. A few of the other girls walked in from the locker room. There was bulimic Erin Sayers from New Mexico. There was snake-tattoo Kelly from Pennsylvania, and then behind them was someone I’d never seen. She was tall but she looked so young—like a middle-schooler. We made quick eye contact and then she stared aloofly at her nails.
Her name was Stephanie Garcia, and she was a backstroker, like me. I’d worked hard to establish myself on the team, to make myself indispensable. I couldn’t believe it when, five minutes later, she surged by in the lane next to me with what seemed like appalling ease. She was like an engine running on cool, mean energy that would never be depleted, a new model that makes you see all the clunky proportions and pulled-out wires of everything else. I tried to catch up, I really tried, but I couldn’t.
Five hours a day, six days a week, gouging it out in the hours before school started; the cracked hands, the chlorine hair, the shivering bus rides and random hotel rooms, the fees, the dogged effort of my parents, the year I didn’t menstruate, all of it to just be really, really, really good at one thing. And then someone strides in with a kind of poured-gold natural ability; someone who hits the clean, high note you’ve been struggling for with an almost resentful nonchalance, and the game is over.
You could feel the coaches, even that morning, readjusting their focus, reassembling the team in their minds. I could see how it would all play out—how hard I would have to work, how many more hours I would have to put in, just to maintain my place. Older, shorter, I would never be as good as her. Plus there was my shoulder. I’d been ignoring it, but it was there—a light popping that couldn’t be worked out—a button caught somewhere in the works. It would only get worse.
Mentally, I quit that morning. A part of me wondered if I’d been secretly waiting for something like this to happen, or if I wasn’t as determined as I always thought I’d been. But it wasn’t that. It was an immediate understanding of what was now before me. A lifetime of knowledge and observation served me in one life-changing assessment. I guess I can be grateful that I just knew and didn’t delude myself.
It took me a week to say something to Coach Serena. She was the kind of clean, windswept older lady I hoped to be one day. But her manner during our conversation, though perfectly pleasant, confirmed my instincts. She said she was sorry to see me go, and I believed her, but she didn’t try very hard to convince me to stay. I stared at a decorative bronze anchor hanging on the wall of her office in a low-lit subbasement of the Memorial Gymnasium as we made the sterile small talk—so different from the years of barky, feral encouragement—that would be our final interaction.
With a year and a half left of college, I found myself beached on a communications degree I had no interest in. When I’d had to pick a major, I’d gleaned from other swimmers that it would be the easiest, but I’d still barely coasted by. I graduated by a hair, and, not knowing what else to do, I moved in with my friend Grace. We had a small one-story house in Tempe. I got a part-time job at a cell phone store—long, silent afternoons behind a counter, or assembling cardboard cutouts of buxom families on their devices. I started coaching, herding little kids in their bathing suits with their big stomachs, talking to parents who lingered after practice. It was all the chaff of the swimming world I’d once dominated, and I realized I had no interest in being on the sidelines. I wanted to shuck it all off.
I went to a career counselor at Alumni Services and she convinced me that the determination I’d exhibited in my swimming career, as well as my communications degree, made me a perfect candidate for some kind of vague position in the business world (she mentioned something like “account manager” and “verticals”), and that moving to the East Coast, where I didn’t know anyone save a cousin who bore for me a mutual dislike due to years of forced hanging out at holidays and family reunions, was not a terrible idea.
My second mistake was not doing more research and finding a good place to live. I was moving to a big city, a place I didn’t know, but I didn’t realize there were neighborhoods where young people were supposed to live. I believed the website of the apartment complex I ended up moving into, called Robins Landing, that said it was a mile from the charming downtown of a sub-city called Arlington. What they didn’t tell you was that it was an unwalkable mile of overpasses and parking garages, part of the never-ending Washington, D.C.–area sprawl.
Still, when I first started, I liked the job. I liked the rituals of the working business world, all new to me. I took satisfaction in my painstakingly selected svelte new professional clothes, and striding across the rain-soaked walkway and through the glass doors of the building I worked in. And other little things, like shaking a sugar packet in the break room, and then pouring it into a mug of coffee. I saw myself doing that from the outside, efficiently shaking a sugar packet in my pencil skirt and quarter-inch heels. This is what people did, I thought. They got jobs. They went to meetings. They made friends and exchanged knowing and humorous comments in the hallways about all the same TV shows.
I did hang out with Paula, my cousin, a few times, at her massive house in Silver Spring, Maryland. I’d balance a glass of wine on my lap and sit in the excruciating silence I remembered from our interactions as kids. “Nice bowl,” I’d say, pointing to the one on her coffee table. “Is that— Did you make it? Is it made out of clay?” “No,” she’d say, wiping something off the corner of her mouth, her red hair scraped back into a bun, her old-man’s face as usual just never giving an inch. “It was a gift from Danny.”
“Danny …”
“Kinsmith. Your other cousin? If you ever called him he’d tell you he’s taken up ceramics.”
I got cable and high-speed Internet. I said hi to my neighbor, a Syrian refugee named Joyce, while getting the mail. I inched forward on the parkway every morning in my car. I bought a lot of frozen dinners and microwaved them and dealt with all the packaging—plastic film and cardboard and compartments that needed to be pushed down in the trash. I sorted through credit card offers and bills and junk mail with the meticulousness of someone with too much free time. The complex had a game room with a pool table and a flat-screen television and sofas, and now and then I’d take a book and go sit and spy on the other tenants, the few who ventured in to watch sports. Or I’d idly sketch the fake holly branches coming out of a vase in an alcove in the wall, and then my hand would pause on the page and I’d look up and see myself from the outside and wonder just how I got slung into this padded room on the damp East Coast, and I couldn’t tell if every decision I’d made up to this point, every link that had led me here, had mattered a lot, or hadn’t mattered at all.
Back up in my apartment I’d lie in the middle of my living room and toss a small pillow up and down, and think about my virginity, and wonder if it subtly shaped everything I did. Was it possible that people could tell on some frequency, like that pitch or tone that only dogs can hear? Were the un-lubed, un-sexed wheels and gears in me making my movements jerky? And would that quality itself ward men off? I could already feel that happening. Out at a bar, when a guy started talking to me (not that this happened very often), all I could think about was where it was going to go. I wouldn’t be able to get into the flow of conversation because I’d imagine the inevitable moment when I’d have to tell him, and how fraught it would then become, and how strange he’d think it was that I’d picked him. Or maybe I wouldn’t have to tell him, but was it possible to just play it off? But then my hesitation would read as disinterest and the whole thing would derail from there. I could see what was happening—that the more I obsessed, the more I veered off track. But I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t relax. And so here I was, twenty-six and bottlenecked in adolescence, having somehow screwed up what came so easily to everyone else, and I couldn’t put my finger on when this had started happening.
Eleanor Pierce: We’re at another sleepover. We’re sitting in a circle and talking about sex and who’s done it and who hasn’t. It’s about half and half at that point. Blissfully confident in my youth, I tell the truth, which is that I haven’t. “Me neither,” said Eleanor. “But I’ll kill myself if I’m still a virgin when I’m twenty.”
“There’s something we’ve been meaning to tell you,” said my father over the phone. I was standing in my kitchen, staring out the window at suburban Arlington. Silvery, overcast light came in. In the distance, I watched a man in a blue polo shirt push a dolly of boxes along a path through the storage complex next door. He stopped, put his hands on his hips, and looked up at the sky. “Climate Control! U Store U Save First Two Months Free!” it read on the side of one of the units.
After I’d put in my two weeks at Quartz, I’d decided: I was going to move home. I was going to go back to Texas and live with my parents for a little while. I would start over, reassess. At least I knew people there, people who could help me meet other people. I pictured the bright plaza at San Antonio Tech where I used to wait for my mom while she worked on her business degree, the hot benches and spindly trees. Maybe I could take some classes. I thought of the dry, bright air, our sunny kitchen and backyard and the prickly grass, and the smooth, warm stones that lined the walkway up to the shaded porch in the back.
“Your mother and I have decided to rent out our house this summer. We’re going to Costa Rica. There are some things we need to work out.”
“What?” I said.
“We found a tenant. A nice guy. A carpenter.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“What don’t you understand?”
“Any of it.”
My dad was silent.
“You guys never do stuff like this. And who just rents a random house in a random neighborhood?”
“We found a guy, he’s a carpenter.”
“You said that.”
“People rent things all the time,” he said. “You’re renting an apartment, are you not?”
This kind of indignant, sideways logic that it was always hard to refute in the moment was my dad’s calling card.
“This is different,” I said. “You know what I mean.”
“No I don’t. If you’re so set on leaving D.C., you could always go stay with your aunt.”
“What kind of carpenter? Is he in some sort of recovery program?”
“What? I don’t know, Julia, but we’ve signed an agreement and it’s happening.”
“What the hell?”
My dad was silent again.
“There’s no way I could stay with Helen,” I said. “She’s a psycho.”
“I didn’t mean Helen.”
“Remember when she painted all those pine cones and flipped out about it?”
“I wasn’t talking about Helen.”
“Or Miriam. What, does she have like five dog-walking businesses now?”
“I was talking about my sister. Vivienne. Remember Vivienne?”
I paused. Three memories came flooding back: Vivienne presenting to me, with quite a lot of fanfare, a framed seashell on some kind of burlap background, and not knowing how I should react; Vivienne getting her hand caught in a glass vase, her fingers squished in its neck like a squid as she developed a fine sheen of perspiration on her forehead; Vivienne’s head tilted back thoughtfully against a stone fireplace. Vivienne. Weird, distant Vivienne.
“Oh yeah,” I said. “How is she?”
“She’s fine. She’s still in North Carolina.”
“Really?”
My father never talked about his family, or his childhood in the South. His father was an alcoholic, he had a sister who died. A car accident. And that was it. When I pictured his upbringing, which wasn’t often, I always imagined a series of sturdy, tired, old people standing next to an overgrown pickup. We’d only ever spent holidays with my mother’s side of the family—all the cousins and aunts were hers.
He muffled the phone. “What?” he yelled. He came back. “Your mother wants to talk to you.”
“Where in North Carolina?”
“Where I grew up, outside Durham.”
“And, I mean, what is she doing?”
“She’s fine. She works. She’s got a business painting scenes on plates.”
“Excuse me?”
“A business. Painting scenes. On plates. She’s actually pretty good.”
“She paints plates?”
My father sighed. “It would be nice for the two of you to reconnect.”
I wasn’t sure where this came from. He’d never cared before if I spent time with his relatives.
“Like, dinner plates? Does she make a living that way?”
“Hi, Julia.” It was my mom.
“Hi, Mom.”
“How are things?”
“Fine,” I said. “I heard about your plan.”
She cleared her throat. “Yes!”
“Dad said you needed to work out some stuff?”
“Yes, well, no, this isn’t … We’re fine.”
My parents had been married for a long time. They’d started their own business together, an online retailer called the Trading Post where they sold used saddles, a niche they’d managed to corner, and that drew on my mom’s know-how from her riding days when she’d been Collin County’s regional gold medal eventing champion. They’d always been dismissive of each other in a way I’d taken for granted and sort of admired. I thought that’s the way it was with married adults; you ignored each other all the time in a brassy, warm way. It occurred to me now that maybe it hadn’t been so warm.
“I overheard,” my mom said. “You’re thinking of spending the summer with your aunt?”
“That was just something Dad said.”
“Well, it might be nice.”
“Yeah, well.”
“Have you seen her plates?”
“No,” I said. “When would I have done that? Why would I have? I don’t even understand what they are.”
“She’s pretty good at it.”
“Yeah, well. No. Nope. I’m not going there. There’s no way I’m doing that.”
One month later I drove down a thin driveway, gravel popping beneath the tires, toward a house with white columns in the distance. All around stretched raggedy green fields, shiny in the late-day heat. I looked at the piece of paper on which I’d written Vivienne’s address: 2705 Three Notched Lane. I had no idea if I was going toward the right place. It had been a while since I’d seen a turnoff, much less a mailbox with an address on it. I passed a large twisted weeping willow. I passed a slumping wire fence. The house, bright in the sun, was on a gentle swell, and behind it was a dark line of trees.
It was only after I’d gotten off the phone with my dad and adjusted to the idea of not being able to go home that the idea of Durham began to take shape. I looked it up and saw that it was a midsize city with a lively downtown area and a historic-district repaving project, and that’s when the idea began to take shape. Scrolling through the stock pictures on the tourism part of the website, I saw one of a man and woman laughing at a candlelit dinner. Another showed a couple wearing bright T-shirts and lounging in each other’s arms and staring at a hot-air balloon in the sky.
I thought, This is where I’m going to lose my virginity. It would be like going to another country; I would be completely anonymous. I could do whatever I wanted, and it wouldn’t be attached to the chain of small failures I’d managed to accrue in Arlington, where I might run into Jessica and Kidman, or in Arizona. I could go to a bar, meet someone off the Internet, join some kind of singles-outing group, whatever. I could be one of these people, walking hand in hand in the sun next to a glass building in a revitalized business district with refurbished cobblestones. I didn’t even care that the graceless plan formulating in my head—of just getting it over with, in some anonymous encounter—was so far from how I’d always thought it was going to be, because I was so desperate to get rid of the albatross around my neck. The new plan also had the added incentive of basically being my only option.
I continued slowly along the driveway. A humid breeze came through the windows. It had been a sticky seven-hour drive that included two wrong turns and lunch at a shopping complex where elevator music stood in the air like pond water. Northern Virginia had been a three-lane highway lined with sound walls, which opened up into strip malls, churches, thrift shops, and gun stores as I got farther south. Then it was pretty, sloping fields, and pastures and farms; small towns with deserted streets and mansions set back from the road and fruit stands and dark, closed-down shop fronts. The way got narrower as I approached Durham, and for forty minutes I trailed a truck with two haunted-looking horses inside.
I tried to bring up all my memories of Aunt Viv. I kept thinking of us playing the card game Spit in our kitchen in Texas. I must have been ten or eleven years old. I thought of our hands whirring over the table, over ever-building and eroding piles. Viv is wearing a cotton shirt and she has an air of quiet superiority over her. But I don’t mind, because the companionship I felt with her was like being the sidekick to someone immensely capable. I remembered walking slowly through the backyard—she must have been visiting for the summer—and she’s pointing out what different plants are called, satisfied by my interest, a soft tower of facts. The feeling I had about her at the time was that she knew a lot of secrets. That there was a funny helix at the center of everything and she was the only one who was aware of it, and she would convey this with an amused side-glance that only you were meant to be in on.
I pulled up, got out of the car, slammed the door, and stretched. I looked around. A hot, wide, creaking day. There was the echo of faraway hammering. In the distance on each side were the trees and fences of other properties. The house was weather-beaten red brick, with a wraparound porch and a copper roof. Weedy wildflowers dotted the grass along the foundation. Three tall windows on the bottom level looked dark. An overgrown path led to what looked like a storage shed.
I went up the porch steps and knocked on the door. Nothing. I crouched down and looked through one of the windows but saw only heavy-looking furniture and dark shapes. I turned around, shaded my eyes from the sun. In the distance, a pickup truck crawled by on the road. I went back down and walked toward my car and was about to get back inside when I heard the door open behind me. I turned around and saw Aunt Viv for the first time in probably sixteen years. I tried to compose my face in the right way.
She walked toward me, smiling. She was wearing a T-shirt tucked into khaki pants. Her face had a scrubbed-fresh, almost abraded quality. Her long, dyed-red hair was swept to the side over one shoulder and tied in a floppy orange bow with fake berries sticking out of the knot. She smiled at me, a warm, conspiratorial smile.
“Julia,” she said, in a low, excited way. I remembered that from when I was a kid—how her voice could have a thrilled treble in it. We embraced. We pulled apart and regarded each other. She had aged, and there was a jowly heaviness to her face that hadn’t been there before, but you could still see the shadings of the girl she had been, how I’d remembered her from long ago—when she’d been pretty in a sort of game, clear-eyed way. “That’s a pretty bow,” I said, and then for some reason: “Did you make it?”
Her hand shot up, touched it. Something, ever so slightly, dismantled itself in her expression.
“Oh,” she said, “does it look that way?”
“No, in a good way!”
She smiled again, recomposed. “Look at you,” she said. “Come on up. I’ll show you your room.”
I leaned my suitcase against the wall and looked around. I was in a sparse, clean room with faded wallpaper. After we’d made some small talk about the trip, Viv had led me up the creaking stairs. “Well,” she said, “I’ll let you get settled. The bathroom is just down the hall.” She hesitated, then left.
