How To Find Him

Listen to your mother’s story about playing baseball at fourteen and hearing her own mother say to a friend, I don’t know what I’ll do about Martha’s looks. Wonder if your mom’s speaking in code. Is she going to say that you’re pretty, or has she just told you why she never will? Later, thumb through her high-school yearbook. In the class picture she is the same age as you. She stares ahead sullenly, her face slightly misshapen, like a spring potato.

Squat on the landing in the fuming heat of the late August afternoon. Eavesdrop while your mother and grandmother discuss your fatness and drink iced tea with fresh mint that you picked. Hate them both. Turn your eyelids inside out, stretch your mouth wide, and go, “Bleeeeah,” when they talk about navy blue shirtwaist dresses, their slimming properties. Pinch the roll around your middle. Cry silently.

Riding home on the city bus with Ruthie, feel guilty for having secret thoughts about French kissing and cleavage — thoughts Ruthie doesn’t have. Act conspiratorial. Put your head next to hers and whisper furtively so everyone will think you’re talking dirty. Let the fat woman across the aisle glare and arrange her face in mean, ugly folds. Snigger rudely because she’s pig-fat, because her peach-colored bra straps show, because her swollen feet pooch out of her tight, cheap shoes. Swear to God you’ll never be like her. Pretend to Ruthie that you’re excited about the PSATs, too. Tell her you’ve decided on four colleges: Rice, Tulane, Connecticut College, and Columbia. Nod when she asks if you’re still going to major in English.

Begin to imagine him, wish for him. Keep it literary. Figure out his hair: dark, springy, chewy texture, long on the neck, floppy in front. Decide that his gaze is heavy-lidded, shadowed, that he stares into deep distances. Make his mouth curly, so that even when he sneers you can imagine a kiss with tongues involved. Decide that he loves you because you don’t care about him. (Where did you learn the power of apathy?) Work hard at indifference. Visualize your listlessness diligently, the way some girls imagine their weddings. Alone in your room, practice yawning, looking away, breaking off in the middle of a conversation, being bored. Stare at your moon face in the mirror for hours.

Put your mother over to one side. Your mother does not exist in this equation. Be an existentialist. See yourself in his hazardous car having adventures, going nowhere fast. He gives you a mean smile. His teeth are chalk white, so numerous they overlap, and show dangerously in his mouth, like a shark’s. Expect him to lie to you constantly. Be prepared to hurt valiantly. This is what existentialists do.

Get dropped by Ruthie because she thinks you are as shallow as a saucer. Prove her right. Have hardly any dimensions left. Lose thirty pounds over the summer. Be shallow, slight, skinny, thin, bony. Concave. Tweeze your eyebrows, dye your hair a Clairol red, and buy clothes like everyone else’s. Tell yourself you dropped Ruthie because she has blackheads on her nose, no waistline, and a funny haircut. She juts outward, her childish stomach divided by the waistband of her skirt. Convex. In the halls, feel Ruthie watching silently, betrayed and bulging. Realize you don’t care. Practice boredom in public — in the hall, at the cafeteria, during classes. Sit sideways in your desk and yawn, glance at the clock, pass notes, stare pointedly. Become so thin that you are always cold and have bruises on your tiny ass. Make up your mind to be trouble for someone.

Get asked out all the time, though not by him, the one you have glued together out of snatches from On the Road and Bonjour, Tristesse. Get calls from guys with burry haircuts, guys who wear madras shirts stretched tightly across their athletic shoulders, guys who are solidly packed into wheat-colored jeans, guys who wear penny loafers without socks, guys who smell like after-shave, guys who wouldn’t know an existentialist if one bit them on the butt. They want to take you to wild parties on the river, buy you beer, drive you around town, make their moves in Woodard Park. They ask you out between classes, their eyes pleading like a hound dog’s. Turn them down. Carry a copy of Franny and Zooey everywhere.

Go visit your mother in the hospital that is not a hospital, where nothing matches: the curtains don’t match the walls, the walls don’t match the floors, and the floors don’t match the furniture. The colors are horrible and biological, jangles of fleshy pink and bile green. Sit with your grandfather, your grandmother, and your sister, all of you lined up in plastic chairs like a miniature audience. Your mother talks about the doctor, how amazed he is that nothing makes her angry. She acts it out for all of you: “So he said, ‘What if I drop this? Does that make you mad?’” — and here your mom drops a full ashtray on the floor. “And I said, ‘No.’ So then he said, ‘What if I drop this?’” — and your mom drops a potted plant, which cracks, adding clots of dirt to the cigarette ashes scattered on the linoleum. Now she’s picking up a lamp. Your grandfather rings for the nurse.

Sit in the library staring toward the door, not expecting anyone to walk through it, when he does. He walks right in and crooks his finger at you, just like that: C’mere. Without thinking twice, snap your books shut and jump up. At first, Ruthie acts as if he were an oncoming car, as if she might pull you out of his path, but then she slumps over her valence chart, heaves a morose sigh, remembers that she gave you up for dead a while back. Everyone stares as you march out.

Later, drinking beer in his car in the cold, snowless afternoon, stare at his pure, scornful profile and check off the items on your list, one by one:

Chewy black hair, long in back.
Hard green eyes fringed with black lashes.
Skin the color of a clean penny.
Chalky white teeth — lots of them.
Mean smile.

He could be your first. He has parked his Jag just outside the city, high on a ridge overlooking his family’s brown-and-green ranch. Get jabbed by the gearshift while he breathes hot and wet on your neck, crushing you. He tugs at your clothes, fumbles for his wallet, yanks something out, thinks he’s ripping it open but, in fact, he’s ripping it in half. “God damn it!” he yells, scowling, and holds out the two pieces of his Social Security card, as if it were your fault. Get the giggles. Keep on snorting even when he shouts, “Shut up!” Guffaw unprettily until your stomach hurts. Don’t fuck him if he can’t take a joke.

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