Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [95]
The next page held an epigraph: “As if … what was actual, as opposed to what was imagined, as opposed to what was believed, made, when you got right down to it, any difference at all.” It was from Charming Billy, by Alice McDermott.
So it didn’t matter, apparently, which parts of Claire’s book were true. The story was real and it wasn’t real, the facts as arbitrary and malleable as fiction.
Alison had a strong urge to close the book and put it away, but she hesitated. Her unwillingness to face things head-on was, it seemed, part of the problem.
Leaning against the wall, Alison turned to chapter 1 and started reading.
The opening of the freezer door. Clink of heavy glass. Ice in a silver shaker. When Emma heard those sounds she pricked up her ears like a cat hearing the grind of a can opener. She wandered downstairs to find her mother pouring blue liquid into two martini glasses, setting the shaker on the Formica countertop and licking her fingers, wiping her hands on a linen towel. Twisting a strip of lemon peel into each glass. Handing one to Emma and raising her own.
Cheers.
Sometimes—Emma could tell by the violent smear of lipstick already present on the rim—her mother would be starting on her second when she invited Emma to join her.
Reading and skimming for the next two hours, Alison entered a world both familiar and foreign, a fun house version of reality. She’d been prepared to dislike the book, but she found herself drawn in, seduced by descriptions of places she recognized and sketches of people she knew.
In a small town there are too many people watching and judging, too many ways to be recognized. Not enough allowances. There is no escape; you are defined and labeled before you’re even aware of yourself as a “self”—before you have anything, consciously, to do with it. You make one mistake or two, say one thing to one person, and everybody knows it. Everybody thinks they know who you are, even if you’re not sure, yourself.
Emma’s home was a desolate and lonely place. Cool darkness: heavy drapes pulled shut across sliding-glass doors. Her father was a looming presence, using up all the oxygen, making the air in the house thin and difficult to breathe. Her mother’s unhappiness—creeping, etheric—poisoned what air was left. When Emma walked in the front door her father would give her a blank look, her mother peered through the scrim of her five o’clock cocktails, and Emma would become as indistinct to herself as she was to them.
It wasn’t a novel in the way Claire insisted it was; the details of their real life were accurate, down to the crumbling stone patio behind Alison’s house and the cocktail dress Claire wore to school when she was thirteen to exasperate her mother. The story wasn’t so much fictional as it was partial—a piece of their lives, a fragment of the tale.
Emma didn’t remember much about life before Jill, and she didn’t remember meeting her. All she knew was that when Jill arrived in her life, sometime in the first grade, it was as if she had been there all along.
It was in Jill’s attic room, with its twin beds, that their friendship was forged. With the lights out, each girl was in her own narrow confessional; the darkness yielded secrets that daylight hid. On summer nights, under cool sheets, they teased apart jealousies and grudges, analyzed the flirting techniques of boys at school, critiqued other girls’ boyfriends. Emma would fall asleep listening to Jill’s shallow breathing in the bed beside her, Jill’s leg flung over the side like a Raggedy Ann, cherry stains around her mouth.
The next morning, the two of them would stand side by side in front of the oval vanity mirror, so close that their shoulders pressed together, squeezing into the frame.
“You’re lucky your hair is straight,” Emma would say.
“It’s horrible. Dirt brown.”
“At least it’s not curly. Boiing!” Emma would demonstrate, pulling on a strand and letting it spring back.
“Just be glad you don’t have this nose.”
“Yeah, thank you Lord for giving me freckles instead.”
“My hippo hips