An Inventory Read online

  Joan Wickersham

  Joan Wickersham is the author of three books, most recently The News from Spain. Her memoir, The Suicide Index, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Wickersham’s short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her op-ed column appears regularly in The Boston Globe; she has published essays and reviews in the Los Angeles Times and the International Herald Tribune; and she has contributed on-air essays to National Public Radio. She teaches at the MFA program at Bennington, and has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. Wickersham lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and two sons.

  BOOKS BY JOAN WICKERSHAM

  The News from Spain

  The Suicide Index

  The Paper Anniversary

  An Inventory

  Joan Wickersham

  A Vintage Short

  Vintage Books

  A Division of Penguin Random House LLC

  New York

  Copyright © 2001 by Joan Wickersham

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally appeared in print in One Story Issue #198, New York, in 2001.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Cataloging-in-Publication Data for “An Inventory” is available from the Library of Congress.

  Vintage eShort ISBN 9781101973929

  Series cover design by Joan Wong

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v4.1

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Books by Joan Wickersham

  Title Page

  Copyright

  An Inventory

  Boy 1 was small and soft. He seemed breakable. Serious, soft brown eyes. He built careful buildings in the block corner—this was in kindergarten—a tower on one side and a tower on the other side, an arch in the middle. He didn’t say much. Over spring vacation, he went to visit his grandparents in Texas. You had heard that there were rattlesnakes in Texas, and you worried all week. You kept thinking of him walking around in Texas, his small, unguarded ankles.

  Boy 2 rescued you on the playground. There was a kid who always showed up dressed like a cowboy, who one day climbed the ladder just behind you, put his lasso around your neck, and pushed you down the slide. Boy 2 ran over to see if you were hurt—you weren’t, just shocked by the sudden viciousness of it—and to shout at the other boy, “Leave her alone!” He stood over you while you loosened the rope and helped you pull the noose off over your head. After that day neither of them paid much attention to you, though you taunted the kid in the cowboy suit and looked behind you whenever you climbed the ladder to the slide.

  Boys 3-5 were the boys of elementary school, interchangeable: bright, sturdy, clean looking. You and a lot of other girls liked them; they liked you and a lot of other girls. You ate lunch together in the cafeteria and played at one another’s houses. You knew their mothers and what their bedspreads looked like and what books they read. You talked with them about the things that happened to other people—the operation one kid had to have to, well, no one knew exactly what, but to widen the, you know, hole; the girl suddenly sent to live with an aunt after her father stabbed her mother—but nothing like that ever happened to any of you. [Years later, after you’d all scattered to various high schools, you heard that Boy 5’s mother had died of a brain tumor, and you instantly remembered the smell of her perfume, and the time she asked you if you’d go out to her car to get her cigarettes. “Would you be an angel?” she’d said.]

  Boy 6 was the one you loved, the one who kept asking you to be his partner for science and social-studies projects. He was your introduction to the conundrum that would occupy you for the next decade: the boy who liked you but didn’t like you. (Which brings up the concurrent but barely noticed Boy 6b, who liked and liked you, and whom you liked but didn’t like.) These italics made sense to every girl you knew, and were for a long time the currency of every female friendship, nearly every female conversation. Its coins were gossip, speculation, exhilarating confidences, assurances that somehow provoked more anxiety than they allayed, and devastating revelation, as in the time someone told you that Boy 6 not only liked another girl, but also had taken her to a party and felt her up (and you said, “But there’s nothing there to feel”).

  Boy 7 was the first boy who kissed you, and the last for several years. Which surprised you: you had assumed that this door, once open, would stay ajar. Boy 7 himself turned out to be bafflingly forgettable even though, for the three months or so when he was kissing you and the six months before that when you had wanted him to, thoughts of him had consumed you. Eighth grade ended and Boy 7 disappeared, along with Boy 7b, who had annoyed you all year by pulling your chair out from under you in morning assembly just as you were sitting down, but then sent you letters from summer camp on bright green stationery (you still didn’t like him, but you found the stationery—his mother must have bought it for him—endearingly at odds with his bratty attempts to be cool), which he signed “Love.”

  Then came a frantic clot of boys with whom nothing happened, who each seemed to make brief sense of why nothing had happened with the one before. You were dazzled by a gentle voice and a kind smile; no, a cold stare and an air of having been mysteriously hurt; no, expertise, a violinist; no, pragmatism, altruism, a sweet head bent over a microscope; no, nervous brilliance and a kind of crooked off-centeredness, Mercutio, not Romeo, in the drama club production where you were playing the nurse. The boys talked to you or didn’t, were aware of you or weren’t. For one of them—Boy 10—you baked a birthday cake, and so did the other girl who had her eye on him; there was a terrible moment on a staircase, when you were running down from the second floor with your cake and she came charging up from the lobby with hers, both of you racing to be the first to reach and surprise Boy 10, who stood bewildered on the landing. With Boy 13 (a poet’s chiseled nostrils), things actually progressed to the point where you were sitting on his lap one afternoon in the library, tucked behind the stacks in his carrel which you had been haunting for several weeks. Then—he must have looked down at your bunchy peasant blouse—he said, “My God, you have copious boobs,” and you didn’t know what was more chilling, his use of the word “boobs” or his misuse of the word “copious,” and you slid off his knee and never spoke to him again. [You were in college when, on a late-night train ride to Boston, you told another woman this story, and she said that a boy had once told her she had pneumatic boobs. You both laughed, and wondered if it was a trend among teenaged boys, to create new derogatory phrases by linking preposterous adjectives to the word “boobs.” Well, at that age they’re afraid of women’s bodies, she said. You didn’t know her well; she’d been in one of your classes the year before. She was on her way to visit her boyfriend for the weekend, as were you (Boy 19), and at first you spoke about them proudly, bragging a little; but as the dark train slid and rattled through the hours, she eventually told you she didn’t really love her boyfriend and you said you weren’t sure you even liked yours.]

  There was a devoted couple at your high school—she was a sophomore and he a senior, she was Juliet and Rosalind and Lydia Languish and he was the director. They were always together; they talked solemnly of a certain book, im
portant to them both, a novel called Islandia, which you got from the library and were bored by—it seemed at once arid and overwrought. You returned it. In some confused irritated way you felt your failure to have penetrated it also barred you from love: there was something to get and you just didn’t get it. The couple in your school, with their relentless soulful glued-togetherness, appalled you, but you knew you would never rest until you had what they had.

  You wondered if they were sleeping together, supposed they might be, though you couldn’t really imagine it, for them or for anyone, the mechanics of it, the geometry and the angles, the feelings. The nameless shattering thing you did alone in your room most afternoons had nothing to do with what you thought of as sex. Sex, as you understood it, was about being naked with another person and engaging in insertions that made sense in diagrams, but seemed too awkward and terrifying to actually do, or want to do, or let someone do to you, in real life.

  One afternoon a boy—older, someone who sang in the school choir with you—asked if you wanted to go for a walk. Boy X. [Followed, in later years, by Boy—no, Man—Xb, a stranger who fell asleep, or pretended to, next to you on a train, and whose head slipped onto your shoulder and then down to your breast where his face then began to burrow and you tried gently to push him off but his sleep-heavy, or pseudo-sleep-heavy head, didn’t move and so you let him stay there because maybe he really was sleeping and you didn’t know what else to do. And Man Xc, another stranger who pressed his hard self against your ass on a packed New York City bus, and there was no room to move and you were afraid that if you said “Stop that” he would announce to the crowded bus that you were crazy, and finally another woman passenger noticed what was going on and stopped it by saying loudly, “Honey, why you let him do that to you?”] You said sure. You were not feeling any particular interest or dread, just: Why not? Later you’d wonder how you could have been so stupid. Did you think he wanted to talk about Benjamin Britten, or Mozart’s Regina Coeli? Well, yes, you sort of did. You’d thought he had wanted to talk about something, anyway, even if it was only going to be the stilted exchange of facts and preferences that constituted getting to know another person. That’s what you said, after you’d walked into the woods with him and the two of you were sitting side by side with your backs against a fallen tree and he made his laconic suggestion. “But we don’t even know each other!”

  He looked at you. “What better way is there to get to know somebody?” His eyes were half-closed, he was drawling. You stood up and ran. Your disgust verged on terror and was almost indescribable—at least, you had trouble describing it to Boy 12, whose kindness had elated you and made you wistful at the beginning of freshman year, and who had since evolved into a friend. “But what’s the big deal?” he said now. “Nothing happened.”

  You couldn’t explain. The fakeness of it, the vacancy.

  “Isn’t it supposed to mean something?” you asked, and Boy 12 laughed and reminded you again that nothing had happened and you were okay, and you left him, uneasily. Maybe he was right and it really hadn’t been so bad? So why were you feeling nearly destroyed?

  Part of it, you thought, was that nothing about you had mattered to Boy X except your gender. You could have been any girl. But no—bad as that was, there was something else, something you couldn’t have admitted to Boy 12 and couldn’t even clearly articulate to yourself. In fact there was something special about you that had drawn Boy X to invite you into the woods: you were not pretty. Boy X had been gauging the odds when he looked at you with those half-closed eyes. He’d been aiming low, and he’d felt he had nothing to lose if he missed. Your lack of beauty not only made him think he might succeed, it somehow gave him the right to try. [While you might have been right about this particular Boy X and his contempt for you, you’d been wrong about beauty guarding against the X Boys and X Men of the world. Every woman you would ever get to know—no matter how beautiful—had stories like this one. Or worse. You’d been lucky.]

  You knew that there were things a boy would have to see past in order to fall in love with you—your weight, your skin, a general too-muchness (too many words, too many fierce opinions, too big, too loud, too voluble) that you could not seem to damp down. You thought—or tried to think—of these things as a thicket, the brambles a prince would one day hack through to get to you. You had wise consoling words for friends of yours who also worried about being too much, too intense: “That is the very thing that someone will one day love about you.” But what the hell did you know? You would have liked to be a tragic pale girl on the moors, or some other kind of mysterious sufferer, a poet, a muse, a wayfarer; but you knew—your mother told you—that you mostly came across as sullen. You were waiting for the boy who would—would what? Not just kiss or flatter you, but recognize you, and whom you would recognize.

  By now you had begun to gaze at Boy 18, who was in your English class in the spring of junior year. You liked his quiet, sprightly, manly dignity. He had a way in class of reading poetry aloud that conferred on each poem the tone it required. “Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving”—you don’t remember anymore who wrote the poem, but you can still summon up the mournful bell-toll of his voice reading it. He had delicate yellow hair, pale blue eyes; every day he wore a tweed sport coat and a white shirt, while the other boys were all dressing like lumberjacks and stevedores. He had an air of sadness, you thought, but it was somehow a pragmatic sadness, as if he were saying, “Yes, life is pointless, but then why not just get on with it?”

  You talked with him about books. Virginia Woolf, Nathanael West, Maupassant, Faulkner, Kafka—you could be glib about all of them, even the ones you hadn’t read. You giddily paraphrased Katherine Mansfield to him on the novels of E.M. Forster—something about how he warms the tea pot beautifully, only there ain’t going to be no tea, and he said gravely, passionately that no, there really was tea, and that you should re-read Howards End. You did read it then (for the first time), and told him he was right, there was tea; and he paraphrased Katherine Mansfield to you on the difficulty of discerning whether Helen Schlegel had been impregnated by Leonard Bast or by Leonard Bast’s forgotten umbrella. You discovered that you both liked, and were good at, writing limericks, and you started slipping them through the vents in each other’s lockers. This was all it took, that spring, to flood you with happiness: the moment when you would open your locker and see, lying on top of your book bag or half in and half out of your cruddy gym shoes, a slip of white paper, with five lines of his small sloping letters, written in black fountain pen. Conversely, opening your locker and not finding a limerick was beyond disappointing—it felt crushing, as if you’d been abandoned, though you knew that the rarity of his offerings, and the suspense, was part of what kept you interested, and you worked to match your pace to his, to restrain yourself from littering him with too much rhyming confetti.

  During your senior year, you and he were co-editors of the literary magazine. The art director was your best friend: the girl who knew all your secrets. She could understand why you liked him—she liked him, too—but liking him? What did you like about him? You would try to enumerate, and she would look politely dubious, which made him seem more entirely yours, or at least more entirely intended for you. You kept waiting for him to see this. In the darkening fall afternoons, while other people played football or programmed in the computer lab or made out in the theater lighting booth, you and your best friend and Boy 18 sat at a table at the back of the library, sorting through poems and stories and drawings. She was small, vivacious, elegant. She was also, you knew, unhappy. She liked bad boys, brutal boys, motorcycle boys. She worried every month that she might be pregnant—who knew if foam worked the way it was supposed to, and he refused to wear a rubber. She worried that she was dumb, while you worried you were ugly; you reassured each other, no no she was smart, and you were very attractive. All of this was hidden during the afternoons when you sat around that table with Boy 18, choosing and pruning and d
iscussing and arranging. The three of you laughed and laughed.

  A touring theater company was coming to your town with a production of Our Town. You invited Boy 18 to go with you. He blushed and cleared his throat and told you that he had, uh, actually already invited your best friend to go with him. (You fastened on that word “actually”—the pomposity of it, the self-regarding, inhibited precision. You stood there looking at him, mentally imitating him: “Uh, actually,” “ac-tually”—it was the first remotely critical thought you’d ever had about him—and imagined the fun of mocking him aloud, later; but of course the two people with whom you would have mocked this sort of thing had suddenly become unavailable.) But, he added, you’d be welcome to join them.

  Incredibly, you did. It was partly that you couldn’t figure out how to say you were doing something else that night when having issued the invitation made it clear that you weren’t, and partly that you simply couldn’t let them go without you; jealousy, and curiosity to see them together in this new way, and hope that maybe he would change his mind or that maybe you were misinterpreting the situation, beat out pride. You waited alone outside the town hall and watched as they came walking toward you together; and then you went in and watched the play and thought of how convenient things were in art, where there seemed to be only two young people in town and so they fell in love (the fact that it ended in death and grief seemed to you, that night, beside the point). The three of you kept working together on the magazine. He kept taking her to things—a movie, a coffee shop. She kept saying yes and going, even while she kept sleeping with the motorcycle boy. She didn’t seem to notice that your friendship had cooled, that you’d stopped confiding in her. [She wrote to you in college, to ask what had gone wrong in the friendship. You wrote back, curtly, and told her. She wrote back pages of apology. She honestly had not realized, she said. She had never thought of it as stealing—nothing had ever really happened between them, he’d never even tried to kiss her. It was really just that I admired you so much, she wrote, and you admired him, so I tried to admire him too. You were both so smart, she wrote, I wanted you both to approve of me. You crumpled up this letter and didn’t write back; but she kept trying. She wanted to see you, she wrote, when she came East for Christmas vacation. Finally you said yes, worn down by her persistence and her distress, which seemed real; and you went out to lunch with her and kept in touch after that. And though it took years for you to really trust her again, and you and she have lived in different states for years now, she is still one of the people you are closest to.] Meanwhile Boy 19, who was Boy 18’s antipode, was beginning to shine in the distance.