The Sixteenth of June Page 15

  They stepped back to examine the banner. “Do you think it’ll hold?” she asked, looking dubiously at Leo’s roll of masking tape. She imagined the banner floating down during the party and landing on June’s head.

  “It only needs to last a couple of hours.”

  A couple of hours! It seemed so obvious when he said it. “And you’re sure it’s straight?”

  Leo shrugged. “People will think it’s straight because it’s supposed to be.” With that, he sauntered out of the room.

  “Whoa!” Nora trotted after him. “Where are you going?”

  “I figured I’d see if my mom needs anything else. You know how she gets.” Leo regarded her. “You okay?”

  “I was worried—” But Nora stopped, unsure how to continue. She was worried about the fight she’d overheard. Worried about her friendship with Stephen. Worried that one day Leo will turn to someone and say, “I need to check on Nora. You know how she gets.” Nora had a thousand worries she did not know how to name.

  Leo reached out and put his hands on her shoulders. “Relax, love. Go get a drink. Everything will be fine.”

  The bar wasn’t fully set up, and Nora felt too self-conscious to reach for the vodka. So she headed to Carol’s nook under the stairs, the ironing room, June called it. But Nora thinks of it as Carol’s room, a secret space in the house that is nearly tropical, the sultry warmth from the dryer mixing with lingering steam from the irons. How many hours had she and Carol spent there, laughing about something from choir, gossiping about June? Nora always sits on the washing machine, watching Carol feed bedsheets through the rotating press. It’s the one place in the house where Nora doesn’t have to worry about her posture or manners, where she can relax.

  She half hoped Carol would be there, called in to do some last-minute chores. There she would be, pressing hemstitched napkins into perfect squares, looking up with her liquid eyes when Nora turned the knob. But the room was empty. And Nora knew when she found it vacant how this would end.

  Was she ashamed that she couldn’t hold out? She was, but the relief exceeded the shame. Her fingers were exquisitely attuned to her scalp, and when they raked over its surface, some process commenced of its own accord, her mind going blank, focused only on the precise millimeter of space she touched, her mouth filling with saliva just before she pulled. One, two, three, the hairs came out. The first three were duds, but the fourth had the prized white bulb on its end, glistening, a scepter. Holding it, she felt triumphant. Just a few more, she thought.

  This is how it goes. There is always a reason, a special set of circumstances. She doesn’t pull out of habit, the way Leo seems to think. “You pulling?” he sometimes asks. As if she would do it without realizing.

  He had left his browser window open one time. The website came as a shock. She clicked past the medical pictures with a shudder, whole scalps plucked bare, and looked at the lists of clinical terms. Trichophagia, she read, flinching. As if she would ever eat her hair.

  She didn’t feel a rush of recognition. She never pulls from other parts of her body. It doesn’t interfere with her functioning. Besides, isn’t it arbitrary, what gets deemed a disorder?

  People do worse. Those men on the stoop, drinking to get through the day. And then Jon and Mike, smoking. Sharon, too. Aren’t those behaviors more harmful? Wouldn’t a doctor prefer that she pull her hair rather than ruin her lungs and liver? The outside of the body is a surface. People tattoo it, pierce it. Yale probably has anthropological courses on how such behavior is relative. Probably somewhere in the Amazon women from indigenous tribes sit in circles, grooming one another, plucking hairs and swallowing them.

  But no one wants to hear her speculate along such lines. Even the academic shrink had paused, eyeing her. Worse than I thought, Nora could see him thinking.

  Leo had told his family about it without asking her permission. She thought she’d been imagining their little looks, June’s eyes drifting to her hair. “Of course I told them,” Leo said blankly when she asked. “They don’t judge you, Nora.” She looked at him and laughed. “Your mother invented judging. Do you really not see that?”

  “What do you think his motives were?” the academic shrink asked, gazing at her. “He cares about me,” she was supposed to reply. “He loves me. I guess he just wants to help.”

  Her habit was supposed to become the demon. Her tick, the trich. It was the bad boyfriend she was supposed to dump, choosing virtuous Leo instead. Love would conquer all. She simply had to make the choice, to marry rather than be ill.

  But what if they were wrong in how they classified problems? What if the men on the stoop and her dad needed shrinks more than she did? When she rejoins Leo upstairs, he’ll be pleased to see her relaxed. All she needed was some downtime, he will muse, thinking that his advice worked.

  This was what she tried to explain to the cognitive therapist. How do you stop doing something when it feels like it helps? What do you do when the solution to the problem is the problem?

  Ultimately, she doesn’t fault Leo for his efforts. He thought he could erase her problems as if they were stains. Leo the Fixer. Leo the Problem Solver. She imagines a white can in one of Carol’s bins with a sketch of his profile, assuring and calm. “Two shakes gets the problem out!”

  That has been their dynamic all along. It was he who convinced her to stay at Delancey that summer, after her mom was diagnosed. “Oh, I couldn’t,” Nora said with a nervous laugh when he suggested it. She loved the idea of spending the summer with him, but there was just no way. “No way?” he repeated, raising a brow. This was not a phrase in the Leopold lexicon. “Why’s that?” “Oh, about a hundred reasons,” Nora replied as he wrapped his arms around her, thinking of money, her mother, logistics. “I don’t want to spend the whole summer apart,” he murmured. “What would I tell my parents?” Nora asked. “We’ll make shit up,” he told her.

  That was exactly what they had done, fabricating a story about a musicologist at Penn. “It’s an amazing opportunity,” she explained to her parents over the phone while Leo looked on, coaxing her with his hands. “And it’s free?” her dad asked. “Yeah. I mean, this guy’s a friend of my program director’s. At Yale? And Stephen’s parents offered to put me up. They have this whole attic—it’s got a bedroom and everything. On its own floor? You know, separate.” Leo was waving at her frantically to stop talking. A pause on the phone ensued. Free, she could hear her dad thinking. But she felt the word in its other register.

  “Of course you should do it,” her mom said. “Sounds too good to pass up.”

  Did her mom know? Did she suspect Nora of lying? “He’s a madman,” her mom would say after a fight, picking up the things Nora’s dad had thrown. Then why? Nora could never bring herself to ask. Why do you stay?

  Maybe her mom understood that Nora couldn’t abide by her choices. Maybe her mom was glad one of them was getting away.

  Nora had never liked being at home, but at least she and her mom used to hang out. When she came home on break, they would spend a day at the mall, catching a matinee, then visiting the pet store to see the kittens, touching them through their cages. Later they would go out for ice cream and trade stories. It was a silly ritual, but it was theirs.

  After the diagnosis, Nora felt their dynamic shift. Her mom wanted to ignore being sick, but it couldn’t be ignored. So it sat in the house like a bad smell. “Do you want to go see a movie?” Nora asked when she came home that spring. “Maybe tomorrow,” her mom replied, too stubborn to admit that she was tired. Nora was left in limbo, not knowing what to do. If she went out with a girlfriend, her father would berate her. “You’re supposed to be here to help!” he’d yell.

  He, on the other hand, had no trouble ignoring his wife’s illness. He went right on expecting his meals cooked, his laundry done. “Let him do some of this stuff,” Nora hissed when she saw her mother unloading the dishwasher
days after her surgery. “He doesn’t know how,” she said with a smile, letting Nora take over. She sat down in her chair. “Marry one that cooks,” she advised. “Apparently they exist now.”

  The two families had gone out to lunch once at the end of that summer. Nora finally told her parents about Leo, and an awkward meal at Devon Seafood ensued. Nora cringed at the collision of her different worlds. “Jeez,” her dad said, looking at the prices on the menu, “does the ocean come with the fish?” Michael smiled pleasantly across the table while Nora wanted to sink beneath it.

  They stumbled their way through the meal, Leo cracking jokes to put her parents at ease. Her mother tried to engage with June, nodding thoughtfully at her airy remarks and stories of her time in Manhattan. “I grew up in Brooklyn, you know,” Iris said. “Ah, Brooklyn,” June replied.

  In a polite battle at the end of the meal, Michael tried to slip his AmEx to the waitress. “We insist,” Nora’s mom said with a polite smile. “On splitting,” Nora’s dad clarified. “Oh, Frank.” Nora’s mom shook her head.

  “Well,” her father said, stuffing his credit card back in his wallet and nodding to Leo. “You’ve got your work cut out for you with this one. I give you credit for even trying.” Everyone froze as if a current of electricity had shot through the table. “She’s not so tough to take,” Leo replied after a beat. Nora’s father made a face of incredulity as though Leo had said something absurd.

  Michael, at the head of the table, cleared his throat. “We adore having Nora stay with us, Frank.” Michael hesitated, as though about to say more, but then Leo changed the subject in his smooth way, steering them into a different conversational lane.

  Delancey had been her shelter that summer, the architectural equivalent of Leo’s arms. Nora often had the place to herself. Leo worked during the day and Stephen studied at the library. Michael and June were usually out until the evening. Nora listened to CDs on their expensive sound system. She studied scores in the sunny kitchen and made herself tea. She imagined she was in Paris, put up in a fancy hotel. She imagined crowds gathering to see her. Each morning she woke up and, seeing the attic’s eaves, remembered with a smile that she had escaped.

  Leo came up to her room most nights, the queen bed pitched under the roof’s peak. Nora would be listening to Chopin or Debussy. Maybe this is how it can always be, she would think. They made love loudly, having tested for sound once during the day, Leo jumping on the bed and yelling while Nora, one floor below, heard nothing but her own laugh.

  After he had fallen asleep, she would study his face, illuminated by the bedside lamp. He’s a good guy, she would reflect, watching his chest rise and fall. He even cooks.

  Vacations can’t last, she would tell herself in the morning, walking to work. She was waitressing at Manning, and it was an easy walk. She started with breakfast and lunch service, but soon picked up night shifts, the time slot of glorious tips. She was saving up for airfare to Milan, hopeful that she could put enough aside to buy her mom a ticket to visit her.

  At first, she ignored the live jazz at the restaurant. Her head was filled with Maria Callas. There was agony in that voice, suffering laid bare. Maria Callas made you forget the technical skill, the hours of practice. All Nora heard, busing the tables, was the fight of feelings, their delicate war. She carried trays of drinks but rode the current of that voice, entranced by how it lulled you and raised you at will.

  On Saturday nights, a singer with a fuchsia mouth held the microphone too close and compensated for lack of range by being breathy. Nora began to grow impatient, listening to her wavering pitch. She went back to Delancey and listened to Tosca. But she wondered if she could do better than that lipsticked fraud.

  She didn’t stop to think about what it would mean, taking a job as a lounge singer. What mattered was the dreamy feel of that summer, as though it could be preserved. As though the logistics might change—a loft swapped for the attic; real jobs in place of summer ones—but the feeling would remain.

  What Nora hadn’t anticipated was that disaster could occur on vacation. That you could be shipwrecked, even though the water looked so clear. Here was what she had so often dreamed of, an oasis from the fights and turmoil. Abundance rather than lack.

  Her mom’s chemo was deemed a success, and Nora grew excited for Milan. Her vocal scholarship wasn’t supposed to include a semester abroad, but the program director had applied for special funding. “We’d be remiss in your training to not send you,” he told her. “You’ll see opera as it’s meant to be done.”

  A week before Nora left, her mother’s scan came back showing abnormalities. “But they said they got it all,” Nora protested. “Apparently this happens,” her mother said. “We’ll do another round of chemo. No big deal. Don’t for a second think of canceling your trip.” “Do what you want,” her father said tersely. Nora couldn’t choose right either way.

  She winds the hairs around her finger, then drops them into the trash.

  “Have you pulled before?” the cognitive therapist once asked.

  “Sort of.” Nora remembered pulling when she was eleven. She had tried it as an experiment late at night, pulling a patch of scalp clean over a few weeks. Who knew where the impulse came from? Her parents never discovered what she was up to, and she reveled in her secret. It had stopped on its own, fleeing like a foreshadow, showing itself in a glimpse, promising to return.

  In Milan, opera began to lose its heart. Nora felt glum recognition when her voice coach yelled, “Listen! Hear the anger, the hostility! Then the sorrow, the loss, oh—the bitterly held last note.” Opera had been abstract before, but Nora now understood those emotions better than any junior in college should. She felt herself turn away from them.

  “You don’t want to do opera anymore?” her program director repeated when she returned to New Haven.

  She shook her head.

  He considered this. “I always encourage students to explore different facets of music. But, Nora—you are gifted. Dazzlingly gifted. Your place with a major house—one hesitates to say it is assured . . .”

  Nora stopped listening. One hesitates to say, she thought. Yes, one hesitates. One should hesitate. What is the point of singing in French, in Italian, in strange tongues? She took history-of-music courses the next semester, courses with textbooks that she could read on the train. She decided not to audition for the Paris program. She decided to stay close to home.

  Her senior year, she struggled to pass. She didn’t tell her program director about her mother, even though he kept trying to pry information from her. Her scholarship was in jeopardy, and she knew the logical thing would be to explain her circumstances, as Leo urged. But she didn’t want to be looked at with pity, passing through the narrow halls of the music department. By April of her senior year, her mom was in a second remission. Nora turned in her midterm papers late and begged for leniency. “I’ll pass you,” the director said finally. “But only if you stay on for a year as a voice coach.” “Me?” Nora repeated. “Those who can’t do, teach,” he said lightly.

  He had hoped she would see how much better she was than the freshmen, that she would fall in love with opera again. Marilyn Horne and Renata Scotto were the master-class teachers that year, and they both advised that she continue with her training. “You are meant for La Scala,” Renata Scotto told her in her lovely, lilting English. “This is not a compliment! This is the calling. You must answer.”

  Instead, Nora discovered that she loved teaching. She was good at it. “That’s great,” Leo said. “You can give lessons when we move to Philly.”

  “Do you see what’s happening?” Stephen groaned. “Already you’re regressing because of him.”

  Maybe, but being in New Haven that year had worked out well. Leo was finishing up school in Boston, and her mother seemed to be in the clear. Soon, she and Leo would be in Philly once more. She would give lessons. Maybe she would e
ven try her hand at jazz. The feeling of that summer would return.

  No one could have known what the next few years would hold. No one would have thought the end was so near. Their glorious summer retreated into the distance, and over time the memory of it confused her. What had once been her escape had become a prison. How does one escape the escape?

  Nora scoops the bobby pins from the sink. She faces her reflection to ready herself once more. The creak of the ceiling tells her it is time.

  Fourteen

  Leo imagines it was the grief talking. He watches the bartender assemble his gin and tonic, tiny bubbles racing past the ice. A wedge of lime bobs at the surface like a bloated corpse.

  Stephen didn’t mean it, Leo will assure Nora later, assuming she decides to join him at the party. Who knows where she had run off to?

  The bartender plucks a cocktail napkin from a stack. Leo recognizes it from the kitchen, the bright green edges fanning out to the world like steps in miniature. The bartender places the drink upon the napkin with great ceremony and then bows. “Er, cheers,” Leo says, taken aback by the man’s solemnity.

  People are weird. It is Leo’s only way of making sense of the world, the patronizing Stephens and strangely formal bartenders. But at least the bartender has respect for his trade. “Whatever one does, one should take it seriously,” Michael often remarked, and Leo looks for it at work. Guys like Dave wear slouchy khakis and play video games, too cool to care.

  Leo spears the lime with a thin, red straw. “People don’t always do what makes them happy,” Stephen had lectured. Leo takes it out on the lime, the wedge turning pulpy.

  Across the room, Stephen chats with a tall woman in a silver cocktail dress. Leo recognizes her as one of their mother’s friends. She smiles as she speaks, toying with an earring, regarding Stephen through a fringe of lashes.

  Leo has long been resigned to his brother’s being the handsome one—there is no fighting it. But he also suspects that women can somehow detect Stephen’s aloofness in the way that mosquitoes are drawn to certain blood types. They sniff out the sweet challenge of him from across the room.