A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That Read online

  She lived alone with her father, a former high school math teacher, who was just forty-four years old but losing his mind and forgetting things like a very old man. There were things he still remembered, like Georgia’s curfew and chores, like her mother who went out one night three winters ago with friends from work, met a rich man named Rich, and never came back to them, not even to pick up her clothing, but even those things would be lost to him within the year. “That’s a woman who’s willing to forget us completely,” Georgia’s father said, stating the obvious. “That’s a woman without a conscience.”

  Through weekly phone calls and the occasional letter, Georgia learned that Rich bought her mother everything: a new wardrobe, a house on a hill two states away, and a baby girl from China they named Sam. On the front porch her mother sat on a wicker couch, feet up, talking to Georgia on the phone, describing things in theatrical detail. “The front lawn is landscaped” she said. “Gardenias, Casablanca lilies, and narcissus on one side, waxflowers and eucharis on the other. Waxflowers and eucharis smell like lemons,” she told Georgia, and Georgia imagined flowers smelling like fruit, looking like one thing and smelling like something else entirely. Like a mother who asked you about school, who wanted to know if you liked the two new pairs of jeans she left on your bed, a mother who begged you to eat and tucked you in at night, while at the same time plotting her escape.

  “There’s a circular staircase that leads up to the porch,” her mother said. “Very modern. You will love those stairs, Georgie,” she promised.

  “When will I love them?” Georgia asked, and her mother always said the same thing: when things settle down and we can plan a visit.

  Her brother, Kevin, was off at college in San Francisco and her father didn’t work anymore, just puttered around the house in mismatched clothing, talking to himself and rarely making sense. Sometimes, in a voice that was normal, not at all frantic, he called out her mother’s name, as if the woman were still there, as if she hadn’t left the state and were only a room away. Sometimes he talked about work, the students he left behind, and the subjects themselves, algebra and geometry.

  “A circle’s circumference is pi times double the radius,” he said last week to no one. He was sitting at the round table in the backyard, drinking lemonade, and Georgia was watching him from the open kitchen window, waiting for her Aunt Alma to arrive so she could leave for work. “Double the radius,” he said. “Double,” he repeated emphatically, and he stood up then and stared down at the table itself, as if the circle of it were something to argue with, as if it were morphing into a square or disagreeing.

  “The whole world is unreliable,” he used to say, “but math is certain, fixed, it’s made up its mind.”

  And Georgia, too, had made up her mind, had made it up from the first moment she saw the boy, down on one knee, slipping a sandal on a woman’s foot. Georgia was on a break, sipping a Coke and standing at the store window, staring at a display of boots. She decided to start saving money for one pair in particular—dark brown and laceless. She’d need a shoehorn for those, she was thinking, and it was then that she looked up and saw the foot in its dark stocking pointing at the boy’s chest. She saw an ankle, too, and a calf. She saw a bony knee and part of a thigh. A pillar obscured the rest of the woman’s body, but Georgia wasn’t looking for her then, but for him. His hand disappeared inside a shoebox a second and then came up with the sandal. It was orange—an awful color for a sandal, really—and there was a plastic daisy where the straps met. With one hand he clutched the shoe, with the other he held the back of the woman’s ankle. That was it for Georgia—a boy on one knee steering a woman’s suspended foot into a silly sandal; it was a smooth and deliberate gesture that decided things.

  She took in his face and the dark bangs that fell in front of it. She took in his fingers pushing the bangs away. She took in his jaw and lips and chin, and after he returned the sandal to the box and stood up, she took in the whole boy. He talked to the woman behind the pillar, holding the box under one arm. He was nodding, smiling, obviously making a sale. And then he was looking over at the window—perhaps he caught Georgia staring—and she took in his eyes for the briefest second before turning away and heading back to Yates’ Yogurt.

  It was later at the food court that she saw him again, this time part of his face obscured by the ridiculously big pretzel in front of it. He was sitting at a table with four chairs. Georgia thought about walking over and introducing herself, but instead remained where she was: on a bench about ten feet away from the boy, behind a potted plant, her own face hidden behind the plastic leaves. She pushed two leaves apart with her fingers and watched him brush salt off the pretzel. She watched him sip his soda. She watched him until the pretzel was gone, until his whole handsome face was revealed.

  Georgia’s father had been diagnosed with a degenerative brain disease that even she couldn’t pronounce, some five threatening syllables she gave up trying to say. She could say the other words, though, like frontal cortex and temporal lobe. She could say inoperable, object recognition, and obliteration. It was like Alzheimer’s, only faster, speeded up, a disease in a rush, the doctor explained, and Georgia imagined a disease sprinting—a disease with feet, with toes and heels and soles.

  Georgia, too, was in a rush, but apparently her noonday boy was not, leaning back on the car seat and taking his time. “Slow down,” he said, and she willed her hand to do just that, which added a heightened awareness to the act itself that embarrassed her. She thought about stopping altogether, getting up and out of the car, but decided instead to finish what she started.

  She introduced herself to the boy for the first time on a Tuesday afternoon. He was standing under the big clock, looking at the mall directory in front of him. She gathered up her nerve and walked over to the map, feigning interest in mall geography. He had his finger beside the red X, which told the boy where he was: You Are Here.

  “You lost too?” she asked him.

  “Sort of,” he said, looking around. “I was supposed to meet someone and she didn’t show.”

  “You look more sad than angry.”

  “Yeah, well.” The boy looked at her. He ran his fingers through those bangs. “Do I know you?” he said.

  “You work right across the street from me,” she told him. “I mean, across the way from my store—well, not my store exactly, Mrs. Yates’ store.”

  “The yogurt place.”

  “It’s just part-time,” she said. “I’m going to do other things—with my life, I mean.”

  “We all are,” he said, smiling.

  “Selling shoes is okay,” she said. “At least you get commission.”

  “My name’s Jim,” he said.

  “Hey, Jim.”

  “Hey.”

  They stood there a few moments, not saying anything, until finally he asked, “How long have you been working at Yates’ Yogurt?”

  It had been exactly three months, but she shrugged, pretending not to remember. “I’m Georgia,” she said.

  “How old are you, Georgia?”

  “I’m eighteen,” she lied.

  He lifted his eyebrows.

  “In June.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Want to see my license?”

  “I like yogurt ,” he said.

  There were things Georgia’s father didn’t know, never knew, and therefore could not forget. He didn’t know, for instance, how often she imagined the gray-and-black image of his brain, and the doctor pointing, saying, Look at that, would you just look at that. He didn’t know how many times she’d been to the clinic with health problems herself, sitting across from Ella, sometimes lying, sometimes telling the truth. He didn’t know what she was looking for, and neither did she. He didn’t know that she talked to her mother on the phone once a week and could nearly smell those lemony flowers. He didn’t know that she was the kind of girl who would spend her lunch break in a car with a boy who was really a man of twenty-eight. He di
dn’t know that she would lie about her age, that she would lead the boy out of the mall, through the big glass doors, and into the parking lot, that she would ask him which car was his and then steer him toward it like a puppy.

  Maybe her father was standing in his closet now, she was thinking, not knowing what a shoe was. Object recognition. Obliteration. What exactly do you do with this? he might be wondering, while Georgia, on the other hand, had known exactly what to do only moments ago with what was in front of her—she tossed an empty cup into the boy’s backseat and maneuvered her chest over the parking brake, leaning down and making her way to him.

  One morning last month, before she left for Yates’ Yogurt, her father, standing at the sink in his terry cloth robe and running shoes, was wiping his mouth with a piece of white bread as if it were a napkin. Georgia’s Aunt Alma went to the sink and took the bread from his hand, replacing it with an actual napkin, saying, “Here, Denny, use this.” Georgia’s dad looked down at his palm, at the napkin sitting there, and didn’t recognize its function. Georgia was thinking about functions now, what things are used for, their exact purposes, while she blew on the boy’s balls, and the boy said, “Oooooh, cooling,” like Georgia was a mint in his mouth, like her function was to freshen him up.

  There were things she would not forget: like the boy’s thighs and the car she didn’t know the name of, like the cinnamon bird hanging from the rearview mirror, like the vinyl seats and his shiny shoes, and against her cheek the belt buckle, which was silver and small, almost dainty, which didn’t match the gold watch he wore on his wrist, a wrist that was thick and hairy and unlike the wrists of the other boys she’d known.

  She was going down on him in pure daylight, behind JC Penney’s, her bobbing head and the boy’s tense features obscured only by a short wall and dumpster. As she moved, his unforgettable thighs clenched, his muscles froze, and she heard delivery guys outside arguing.

  “It’s a fucking couch, it’s heavy. You’re a lazy motherfucker,” one guy said.

  “Shut the fuck up,” another guy answered.

  “Fuck you both,” a third guy added.

  Georgia imagined the three of them dropping the couch to the asphalt and moving toward the car. She imagined them peering over that short wall and getting a look.

  The noonday boy was a new kind of boy, a boy who was really a man, a man in slacks and navy blue dress shirt, a man in a silk tie. Georgia understood that his silly garments were only his work clothes, a costume, like the blue jumper Mrs. Yates made her wear. She knew that when he left the mall and went home, he was, like her, a different person altogether—a guy in Levis and bare chest mowing the lawn or a guy in shorts and tank top running laps around the neighborhood park.

  There was a band of white skin on his ring finger, and when Georgia jutted her chin in the finger’s direction and raised her eyebrows, the boy said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m not talking,” Georgia said.

  “Well, you’re looking,” the boy said.

  But it was Georgia’s fault as much as anyone’s, so she said, “I don’t care if you got someone at home who cooks for you.”

  And he said, “She doesn’t cook.”

  When Georgia opened the front door, she found her Aunt Alma on the couch, painting her nails. Her father was on all fours in the middle of the room, playing with Georgia’s dog. “Hello, honey,” Alma said. “You have a good day?”

  Georgia nodded.

  “Sit down with me, Georgie. Tell me what you think of this color. Is it subtle enough? I don’t want anything too flashy. What do you think?” she said again, waving her fingers in the air.

  “I think it stinks.” Georgia wrinkled her nose.

  Her aunt stretched her arms out, elbows locked, and spread her fingers apart. “You don’t like it?” she said, pouting.

  “The color’s fine,” Georgia said. “But they stink—don’t wave them around like that.”

  “Oh, good, you like the color.” Alma looked relieved.

  Georgia walked over to the couch and bent down to whisper in her aunt’s ear. “How long has he been like that?” she said, pointing at her dad’s back.

  “All afternoon. I didn’t even know he liked that dog.”

  Obviously her dad had forgotten that he hated the dog, the dog Georgia had rescued from the streets months ago and begged him to let her keep. “Because of loyalty, because your mother’s a liar and she’s gone,” he said finally, giving in.

  Now her father was using a voice Georgia barely recognized, a sweet and sticky voice that came from somewhere inside him she hadn’t seen since before she was a teenager. “Oh, baby, you’re my pooch, my sweet pooch,” he said. “Remember when Clara was a puppy?” her dad asked, turning to Georgia. And though the dog’s name was Temper and she’d only been with them three months, Georgia said yes.

  She made herself a turkey sandwich and took it to the den. She turned the television on but kept the sound way down low and thought about her father’s forgetting, how today it led to love, or a sort-of-love, or maybe that wasn’t love at all, because her real father, the man made up of actual memories, hated the dog he now thought he loved. Then Georgia decided that love wasn’t a real thing anyway, only something people imagined or pretended to feel, and then she looked at her sandwich, sitting there with little bits of wilted lettuce hanging over the crust, and decided she wasn’t hungry anymore.

  Georgia didn’t know what she felt and barely pretended when she met the boy who was really a man in his car at noon. She called him a boy to his face and he didn’t protest, although they both knew the truth. Perhaps she called him a boy and wanted to believe it because he was more ordinary that way, more conventional, less original, and therefore would become less of a memory. He would be easier to forget if he was just a boy like the others, if, in her mind, he was ten years younger and not as experienced and didn’t know how to smoothly accept the things he accepted: undoing his belt and unzipping his pants with one hand while lifting a lever and letting the seat fall back under his weight with the other.

  On Sunday her Aunt Alma, who up until now only stopped by once a day with groceries and medicine and food, came to live with them for good. Georgia stood in the doorway and watched Alma in her parents’ walk-in closet as she ripped her mother’s dresses, blouses, sweaters, and jeans from hangers and dropped them into two huge cardboard boxes. Alma climbed up on a stepstool and swept the top shelf with her forearm, swinging her arm back and forth until the floor beneath her was covered with shoes: heels and clogs and slippers and boots. She stepped off the stool and picked up a black pump. “Look at this,” she said to Georgia, holding the shoe by its skinny heel with two fingers, shaking her head.

  “What?” Georgia said.

  “This,” she said again, louder this time, making a face and moving the shoe away from her chest like it was a dead animal, a rat or smelly fish.

  “It’s a shoe,” Georgia told her.

  “Yes, well,” she said. “We should have known what your mother was capable of.”

  Georgia held the flaps shut while Aunt Alma taped up the boxes. Later, after her father went to sleep, Georgia helped her aunt carry the boxes outside to the curb, where they sat until morning next to three fat green bags of trash.

  It was noon again, and she should have been anywhere but there. She should have been at the food court sitting with a corn dog or milk shake or bowl of spicy chicken. She should have been doing anything but that.

  She pulled her hand away from the boy, quitting at the exact moment he exploded. He dirtied the dashboard and steering wheel, and let out a huge sigh, a sigh that seemed to fill the whole car. “Fuck,” he said. “Sorry.” He pulled Georgia to his chest and hugged her tightly for several seconds before she wriggled from his arms. “Maybe we could go away one weekend,” he said suddenly.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “I want to touch you too,” he said. “It’s not fair.”
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br />   “To who?”

  “To both of us,” he said.

  “Both of us?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “you’ll never like me this way.”

  “I like you enough,” she said.

  The boy looked sad, like he did the day she introduced herself.

  “Where would you want to go?” she said, feeling guilty. “If we had a weekend, where would you take me?”

  “The mountains. I’d take you to the mountains. I’d rent a cabin. I’d build us a fire. We could roast marshmallows.”

  “I don’t like marshmallows,” she said.

  “We could do whatever you like, then.”

  “I’d rather stay here,” she said.

  He looked around the car and shook his head. “I want to take you away from this,” he tried again.

  “Why?”

  “Why?” he said, surprised, looking at her. The boy leaned back in the seat and let out a small, embarrassed laugh. “It might be cool, you know, to get to know each other.”

  “I’ve got work,” she said.

  “You’re a funny one.” He was shaking his head, leaning over Georgia and opening the glove box. He pulled out a pack of tissues, but before he cleaned things up or could say anything else, Georgia was out of the car and on her way back to the yogurt shop.

  After two weeks of sleeping on the living room couch, Aunt Alma said she’d had enough. Her neck hurt and her back, too. She’d had a life before she moved in, you know. She had needs.

  She moved Georgia’s father’s clothes out of the closet and carried them to the den. Georgia sat on what was her parents’ bed and watched as her aunt lifted her own clothes from an old brown suitcase. She hung the blouses and sweaters in neat rows, trying to pat out the wrinkles by slapping at the fabric with an open palm.