The Intimates: A Novel Read online

  “You’d never get there in one piece,” her mother said. “Much less on time. God knows what would happen to you.”

  Her mother made no secret of disliking and disapproving of Lyla although the two girls had been friends since third grade, the same year Lyla flashed the boys on the playground during recess and got into big trouble for it. She feared that Maize would be vacuumed up into Lyla’s world of unsavory things. She made up all sorts of excuses why Maize couldn’t come to the phone when Lyla called (Maize is in the bathroom, Maize is doing homework, Maize is indisposed) and asked her daughter if it was really necessary for the two girls to speak several times a day. Her mother knew Lyla was bright but an indifferent student. Maize once made the mistake of telling her that Lyla cut study hall, and her mother seemed to intuit all the other things Maize didn’t dare divulge: that Lyla napped during calculus; that Lyla rushed to the girls’ bathroom at the end of the school day to change from her plaid uniform into a leather miniskirt; that she caroused with older men and underage boys she’d met in chat rooms; that she was pierced and tattooed in places Maize’s mother didn’t even want to think about, much less think about adorned. She eyed Lyla suspiciously as someone whose “gallivanting” would derail Maize’s ambition and make it impossible to get it back on track.

  She was partly right, Maize knew. Sometimes Lyla would cock her head at Maize when they were alone together, give her a long assessing look, and say, “You’ve got potential, you know,” and Maize would say, “Oh yeah?” It was exactly what her teachers and guidance counselors had been saying to her for years—You have such potential—only Lyla meant something different.

  Maize liked to think of herself as versatile and open-minded, befriending girls as utterly different as Lyla and Jayne, each of whom thought the other freakish. (Jayne on Lyla: “A sketchy nympho.” Lyla on Jayne: “She’d wear navel rings if she could find clip-ons.”) But secretly Maize knew it was only her own wishy-washiness that made the two friendships possible. Nebulous, ambivalent, ambitious.

  “What? You’re, like, actually stressing about this?” Lyla had said to her last night after dinner, when Maize admitted she was nervous about her impending interview. “A fourth-rate college in Butt Fuck, Vermont? Where the cheesehead students like to smoke up and tip over dairy cows? Come on, Maizie!”

  “I suppose you could call it a safety school,” Maize said.

  “For you it’s a safety school, yeah,” Lyla said. “Not for me. I’m the one who should worry.” Through the phone line, Maize could hear Lyla dragging on a Marlboro Red. “Imagine me there. Walking though the snow with the frat boys and sorority girls. Wearing mohair panties to get through the winter. Shit.”

  Then Lyla rang off. She had to primp for a date with a twenty-four-year-old she’d met on the train to the city. “Catch you at the lingerie place around three tomorrow,” she reminded Maize.

  “Aren’t you going to wish me luck?” Maize said.

  Lyla grunted. “Aren’t you going to wish me luck?”

  * * *

  As Maize drove through their hometown, she wished she could call Lyla again. The insouciance Lyla had loaned her had worn off overnight. Her mother’s fears threaded into her own thoughts and tangled them. Her hand quivered on the steering wheel. She was no longer like Lyla, she was just herself again: a tall and dark-haired honor student who often got tongue-tied, whose almond eyes blinked and high forehead blushed when she had to speak in public, on her way to fail or succeed at something new. If she pulled over and used her cell phone Lyla would undoubtedly still be sleeping. It was only a few minutes before noon. On weekends Lyla was unconscious until at least two, her mouth dry, her long legs parted, her curls a lovely auburn cloud on the pillow. Maize had studied Lyla the times they’d slept over at each other’s houses, until Lyla woke with a languorous groan to say, “Oh shit, babycakes. Is it tomorrow already?”

  For a moment Maize considered calling Hal Jamesley. He was probably awake by now, wearing a smock or a spattered T-shirt and working on one of his paintings. He’d given her his unlisted home number during one of their conferences, swearing her to secrecy because no other student had it but telling her she could use it in emergencies. Yet even as he wrote out the digits on a scratch pad, Maize knew she’d never have the nerve. What were her opening words supposed to be? Hi, what’s up? Do you know the weather forecast today?

  In the village, Maize spotted a pack of classmates sitting on a bench outside the bakery: football players and the pert girls who hung around the boys scarfing down doughnuts the girls hardly touched. She stopped at a traffic light, looking straight through the windshield, hoping they wouldn’t notice her. Not that they did normally. She remembered that the windows of her ex-stepfather Bruce’s car were heavily tinted so she could see people but they couldn’t see her, which was, she thought, exactly the way it usually happened. She didn’t register very much for these people. For all her self-consciousness, she moved largely unnoticed through the hallways, speaking only when called on in class, and even then she mumbled. She imagined that years from now people would see her picture in the yearbook and think, Who was she again? Did I go to school with her?

  On the bench outside the bakery, one of the girls threw back her head in laughter. Maize found herself looking for Bethany Campbell—the only truly pretty girl in the honors classes, and the only girl in honors who hung out with football players—before she remembered that Bethany had fractured one of her long legs in two places last weekend, during a ski trip to Aspen with her parents. Right now one of Bethany’s gorgeous legs was in traction, according to the rumors that swirled around the school, and she might have to have surgery. Maize figured she should delight in a bad thing finally happening to perfect blonde Bethany, who was rich and popular and well-rounded, and whom even the female teachers looked at dreamily.

  But Maize couldn’t feel glee. She felt sorry for Bethany, whom she secretly liked as well as envied. The truth nobody wanted to admit—not the girls, at least—was that Bethany Campbell was genuinely lovely to everyone. She had a flattering personality. She wasn’t stuck up and she wasn’t competitive. She started almost every conversation with a compliment (I like your blouse, I love your earrings, you’re so good at French) and she touched people’s arms when she agreed with them. (“Right! Exactly!”) She smiled and made small talk and congratulated classmates when they got higher test scores than she herself did. You couldn’t go any further than that with Bethany (“Oops—gotta run!” she’d say before you could) but at least she made an effort. That was more than Maize could say.

  The last time Maize saw Bethany they were standing next to each other on the cafeteria lunch line, and after Bethany told Maize she was looking really good (“I love your cheekbones”) she asked Maize what colleges she was applying to. As it turned out, Bethany was also applying to the same school that was interviewing Maize today. “I’m not as smart as you, so it’s kind of one of my first choices,” Bethany admitted with her usual openness. “I don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t get in.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Maize answered. She meant she didn’t think it was a school worth getting at all worked up about, but Bethany interpreted it differently.

  “Thanks. You’re so sweet. Oh—listen,” she said, touching Maize’s forearm. “Wouldn’t it be awesome if we both got in? It would!” She removed her hand to give a two-thumbs-up gesture.

  “I guess,” Maize said. But she’d glanced down at her plate of French fries and the rubbery burgers under the heat lamp, vaguely embarrassed. In truth, she didn’t want any of her classmates to go with her to college. Not even Lyla. She wanted the chance to start completely fresh—dye her hair or throw her voice or change her entire personality and not have anybody complain, “That’s not like you,” with a look of gaping stupefaction.

  “You know what, Bethany?” she heard herself saying. “Sometimes I think I’d just like to go to school in Alaska or something. Or someplace nobody else would
even dream about going. You know?”

  Maize had to stop herself from wincing. She felt herself blush. What did she think she was doing, talking like that on a lunch line? And to someone like Bethany Campbell, no less, whose dazzling blue eyes clouded in bemusement. They inched forward toward the cash register and retreated toward opposite ends of the cafeteria.

  “I saw you over there with the Virgin Bethany. What the fuck were you talking to her about?” Lyla asked when Maize joined her at the lunch table. She was alert to any signs of defection.

  “Oh.” Maize touched her hair, feeling its coarse darkness more acutely after a moment in Bethany’s soft blonde presence. She shrugged. “What would Bethany and I be talking about, Lyla? Nothing.”

  * * *

  The traffic light changed. Maize was clear of the village and passing a ramp to the town where Hal Jamesley lived. She made a left onto the cross-county road, following the simple directions the interviewer had e-mailed her. She studied the road signs with the intensity of an illiterate, narrowing her eyes at each of them and trying not to get distracted by the tassel swinging lazily from the rearview mirror. It was Bruce’s tassel from his high school cap and gown; he’d hung it there for good luck, as if proof of education might save Maize from bodily harm. This was his old Subaru she was driving—one of the few things he’d left behind after the divorce.

  Bruce wasn’t so bad. Her mother had insisted Maize call him “Dad” rather than his real name, from the minute he’d moved in with them, but as she grew increasingly disenchanted she decided that Maize should call him Bruce again. “Stop referring to him that way. He’s not your father,” she’d said to Maize, a few weeks before she banished him from their house. “He’s not your father. Your father is dead.”

  Maize and Bruce had gotten along well enough. He’d never been anything but kind to her regardless of how miserably things were going between him and her mother, helping Maize with her homework, making her lunch sandwiches, praising her compositions and art class projects as if she were a genius. He had a conspiratorial sense of humor about her mother’s craziness, shouting, “Silenzio! Silenzio!” when she nagged them both at breakfast about how sloppy they looked and raising his eyebrows behind her mother’s back. He was big and lumbering, sort of a goofball, but he had a stubborn streak despite his seemingly passive exterior. He repelled her mother’s efforts to improve him by nodding in agreement with everything she said and then doing exactly as he pleased. Recently he sent Maize a photo of himself from California with nothing but the phrase “Why Is This Man Smiling? How Are You, Babe?” on the back. She hadn’t told her mother about it.

  “My stepfather used to smoke a lot of Camels, too,” she said to Hal Jamesley, the week she got the postcard. “My mother’s ex-husband, I mean. I always wanted to try one of them.” She looked at Hal plaintively, waiting for him to reply.

  “I don’t want to be a bad influence on you,” he said. “You know, some sleazeball pusher.”

  “It’s all right. I won’t tell.”

  “It’s pathetic enough that I smoke, isn’t it?” Hal said. But he paused for a moment, staring at his desk. “Okay—here.” He pointed the open end of his pack at her.

  “No. Just a puff off yours is fine,” she said.

  “I tend to lip my cigarettes.” He extended it across the narrow space between them. “It’s kind of gross.”

  “It’s all right,” she said, plucking the Camel from his fingers before he could say anything more. She drew on it sharply, without taking the smoke into her lungs, and exhaled a cloud quickly so she wouldn’t start coughing. “Thanks.” She smiled. “Thanks a lot.”

  Now she turned on Bruce’s car radio to cut through the boredom, flipping through the stations rapidly but unable to concentrate. Overdubbed pop songs. Panicked-sounding commercials urging you to ACT IMMEDIATELY OR LOSE THIS OPPORTUNITY. Classical fugues. Talk shows hosted by reactionary zealots and condescending therapists. Christian programs that sounded almost normal in the second or two before the announcer said, “Remember that come the Rapture we are one with the Lord God Our Creator.” It reminded her of the secular philosopher her humanities teacher had made her class read recently. He’d given them a take-home exam with a passage they were supposed to agree or disagree with in an essay:

  In moments of great swollen emotion—anger or joy or passion—we become someone else. Someone only dimly recognizable from who we are in normal moments, who makes our normal self seem a ghostly shadow by comparison. This fleeting and vivid persona mocks our normal self; it seems more real or more true than our normal self because of its intensity, but it is not necessarily more true or more real. Our real identity lurks somewhere between the normal self and this engorged personality; it is more fleeting, more nebulous and elusive, more frightening and more irretrievable, though we sense its phantom presence like the strange wispy images that appear to us in the ebb moments between waking and dreaming, which we ourselves conjure but do not understand.

  She’d read that passage over and over in her bedroom, in the mornings and just before going to bed, and she still didn’t know how to respond although the essay was due in three days.

  She turned off the radio. Fifteen more miles to go. She fidgeted thinking about the interview. What would he ask, and what would she say? According to her mother you were supposed to define yourself succinctly, pretend you weren’t clueless about yourself and living in a thwarted murk, the way air is thwarted by smog. You were supposed to be a clearheaded Valkyrie who planned to charge ahead in life no matter what, not just past high school but also college, not just past college but your first job and your second job and the next in a fury of achievement, on and on until everybody you knew was left in the dust.

  Maize broke a sweat. She looked to the left and the right of the county road lined with retail establishments, comforting herself with the banal sights. A trinket shop next to a liquor store. A pancake house next to a nail salon. An oil change center abutting the ranch-style motel where Lyla had had an afternoon tryst with an older guy who was a friend of her mother’s. She’d arranged with Maize to give her a ride home. The No-Tell Motel, Lyla called it. But she had told Maize everything and now Maize remembered it, all the lurid details (the hot plate in the room, the crusty self-service coffeepot, the orange shag carpeting and the matching polyester bedspread), as if it were her own story and she had been there herself.

  Maize remembered how Lyla had emerged from the corner room with the man while she waited and watched from the parking lot. The man patted Lyla on the shoulder in goodbye, as he might a niece or a business associate, and then the absurdity of it must have struck him because he hazarded hugging her right there on the gravel, while Lyla looked in Maize’s direction with a strange, uncomprehending expression, as if she suddenly didn’t recognize her. She loped toward the car and addressed Maize from a distance, as if her mind had run off with the man even though her body was now in the passenger seat. Maize had seen Lyla this way before, following her hookups; it took her an hour or two before she snapped back to herself, and then she tended to be distraught for a while.

  “I mean, haven’t you ever felt like you were completely at someone’s mercy?” Lyla had asked once, when Maize commented that she was acting weird.

  “No,” Maize had answered Lyla. “Not even close.”

  She’d had to stop herself from grimacing. Secretly, she half agreed with her mother that Lyla took boys too seriously; it threw her into states of manic-depressive ardor and sapped her energy for other things. Desire was Lyla’s chief ambition—something that kept needing to be fulfilled, unlike other ambitions or goals. It was like applying to the same college repeatedly; just because you’d been accepted once—even early decision—didn’t mean they couldn’t turn you away the next time. You had to apply over and over and over again. What a waste of energy.

  Not that Maize was immune to its debilitating suck and pull. She’d had a few dates and she’d had sex, sort of. Once with a b
oy who’d rubbed a long-necked beer bottle between her legs in the dark of a movie theater, during the gory battle sequence of an action movie, and once in tenth grade with a bisexual guy named Robbie from her chemistry class, who’d wanted to dry hump when they were supposed to be studying valences together. Although she might have gone all the way with Robbie, he’d softened under his corduroys before they’d had the chance. But she’d liked him anyway and began to hang out with him after school, first at her house and then at his much bigger place, where his edgy mother took a shine to Maize right away, offering her soft drinks and the food her maids had cooked, guffawing at Maize’s impersonation of their chemistry teacher, with his high squeaky voice, who complained whenever the whole class failed homework assignments he’d failed to describe clearly.

  “Hah! For once you’ve brought home somebody smart! I like this kid,” Robbie’s mother had said to him right in front of Maize, and later she’d said the same thing more belligerently (“Say hi to Robbie’s friend. I like this kid.”) when she’d introduced Maize to her husband, as if ordering him to feel the same way about Maize as she did or suffer the consequences.

  During their one humping session, Robbie had admitted confusion about his sexual identity to Maize; he didn’t know who he was yet. But he desperately wanted to know and stake his claim on it. As if sex didn’t erase you. As if it didn’t make you, in the act itself, like everyone else who was doing it. As if it were a special talent instead of a handicap. As if it wouldn’t hold you back if you let it.

  Still, there were moments when Maize couldn’t help herself, either. She couldn’t always block men out to focus on more important things, the way she blocked out background noise while doing her homework. Attraction came up suddenly, unexpectedly, at the sight of a hunky cashier or a tall gangly postman, a nerd-boy in honors math or a sunglassed man in a passing car as she drove. Mostly she managed to keep it parallel to her life, something she could spot and dispatch by herself, something she could accelerate or pull away from slowly. But despite these efforts she occasionally caught herself leaning into the feeling, rubbing up against it the way Lyla leaned up against bars, brandishing fake IDs, until it engulfed her, made her part of itself, like an amoeba under a microscope.