“What?”
“He was supposed to be a Schicklgruber. His father changed it.”
That morning Jess had gone into her 20th-Century Lit exam feeling a little dozy, but she knew the material. And while her bleeding was still heavy, she was feeling better,happy to be moving forward. Three more days of exams and then the semester would be over, but she didn’t even want to go home now. It seemed easier, safer, there among the pillows in Clara’s room. By now they’d moved the cushions off the floor, finally just crawling into bed together. Not likethat, but it was comforting. They were oddly compatible, both sound sleepers, and it was strange to find enough room in Clara’s single bed. Although Jess kept trying to make sure, to get Clara to affirm, that she was happy, that she wasn’t encroaching on anything. “Just tell me when you’ve had enough and I’ll go,” she kept saying, and then she stopped, because Clara said it was exhausting to have to keep reassuring her.
“I said I want you here, and I mean it.” Clara put her hand on her heart, “I solemnly swear to never tell you anything that I don’t mean. Will you believe me?”
There was trouble, though. Muffy had cornered Jess in the bathroom. “Where have you been? Are you sick?”
Jess said, “I wanted to give you space.” Their room was small. Although Clara’s was smaller, and Muffy wasn’t so dumb that she wouldn’t see through this excuse.
She said, “I just miss you,” the words dripping. Muffy didn’t like being left out. “And you guys could come out sometimes. It’s like she’s stolen you.”
“Clara?”
“Who else?”
“But I’m right here,” said Jess.
“I’m concerned,” said Muffy. “I mean, you’re carrying around a bag of overnight pads in the mid-afternoon.”
“It’s these exams,” Jess explained. “My hours are all mixed up.” She was afraid for a moment that Muffy might figure out the truth about her pregnancy.
But Muffy was coming at her from a whole other angle. “That girl has bewitched you,” she said. “You smell like patchouli.”
“But what does patchouli smell like?”
Muffy whispered, “Like lesbians.”
—
Everybody went home for the holidays—Jess to her small hometown two hours north of the city, and Clara to the rural county where she’d been raised and from which she’d managed to spring herself at the earliest opportunity. They spent the next three weeks on the phone, Jess stretching the cord tight across the hall so she could shut her door and have some privacy, and Clara complaining, “I hate it here. They make me go to church on weeknights, and there’s nobody to talk to.”
“Itmustbe a boy,” Jess’s mom kept muttering to herself. Friends from high school were phoning too, but Jess ignored the Call Waiting—those friends seemed far away now, and she couldn’t take the chance of meeting up with them and running into her old boyfriend—choosing instead to talk to Clara late into the night. The holidays disappeared in a haze, and then finally it was the new year and time to go back, school seeming more like home than away by now, rather than the other way around.
There was snow, the campus transformed into winter, and Jess wheeled her suitcase up from the bus station because the subway was two whole dollars, and she wanted to breathe the fresh air after her bus ride. Clara wasn’t back yet, so Jess went to her own room, where Muffy greeted her with a squeal. She was listening toBig Shiny Tunes 2again. “This semester,” she said, as she blue-tacked a brand-new poster of Eagle-Eye Cherry up above her bed, “is going to be wild.”
Jess sat down on her own bed for the first time in weeks, taking in the view, Muffy and Eagle-Eye. She pulled an envelope out of her bag, one of the letters Clara had sent her, a card with a map drawn inside, the campus imagined as a universe. The dining hall, the library. The ice cream place on Yorkville Avenue, where you could order a sundae as big as your head—Clara had promised to take her there. Jess stared at the map, tracing the trail her boots had just crunched in the snow, imagining Clara’s feet on the same route, anticipating the sound of her steps in the corridor. She was worried that Clara wouldn’t come back at all, that maybe she had only dreamed her, or that what had transpired between them had been some kind of spell.
But the card in her hand was real, her own name, “Jess Weir,” carefully inscribed upon the envelope, and Clara was real too, appearing later that afternoon. Her long hair was chopped shorter—“My mom cut it”—but everything else was the same, her wide shoulders, her smell that reminded Jess of tea and blankets, the glow of candlelight.
“I brought you a present,” Clara said, unfurling something from her bag, a scarf so long that Jess could wrap it around her neck five times and it would still trail on the floor. Clara picked up an end, then pronounced, “What I Did on My Christmas Vacation. If I’d cast off sooner, there would have been nothing left to do.”
Muffy watched them as Jess told Clara, “I’ve got something for you too,” though it was nothing so grand or homespun. A gift for Clara had been a fraught proposition; her things were so curated, and it seemed presumptuous for Jess to add to the collection, or to hope to. But during a morning of wandering through the shops that remained of her hometown’s downtown, she came across a butterfly-shapedamber pendant on a silver chain—it seemed like something Clara owned already. “Not until now,” said Clara, fastening the clasp. “It’s perfect.”
“Now isn’t that adorable,” said Muffy, perched on her own bed. “Something else to wrap around the neck. You two have got yourselves fully yoked.”
—
That winter smelled like brownies, with Clara baking endless batches from a recipe torn out ofHomemakers Magazine, the page yellowed and brittle, Scotch-taped up the middle. Jess kept trying to help her in the kitchen, until the time they decided to bake a cake after imbibing two bottles of wine and she lost control of the hand mixer, splattering batter all over the cupboards and the ceiling, and it was confetti cake batter, so it looked like a unicorn had just exploded, and neither of them could stop laughing, or shrieking “Jackson!” and “Pollock!” at each other in a hysterical misconstrued version of the Marco Polo game. In the morning they were reprimanded by their RA for both the noise and the mess, so Clara baked another cake as penance (Jess did her a favour and sat on the sidelines), but when they offered slices around, everyone else on the floor claimed to be limiting carbs—Clara rolled her eyes. Not long after that, Jess volunteered a culinary trick of her own, a recipe for cake in a mug from her microwave cookbook, and while Clara was initially suspicious, she was fast converted by the lack of dishwashing required and Jess was pleased to be making a contribution to their domestic arrangement.
Baked goods were necessary, sweetness and warmth with the outside world so harsh and so cold. It was January, and then February, and no matter how tightly Jess wrapped her new scarf around her neck, her head, a chill crept in, exceptfor when she was curled up in Clara’s bed, which was most of the time; Jess was not doing well. The day she got her period again—a return to business as usual—she burst into tears at the stain on her underwear, an emotional reaction she didn’t fully understand. And lately these disconnects were everywhere, like shallow holes she kept stumbling into. She’d started skipping classes, and meals, finding herself detached from the pattern of hours and days that tethered normal people to reality.
Clara tried to minimize the drama: “It’s February. Everybody’s sad in February. You’ve been through a lot.” She gently suggested Jess might feel better if she stopped playing “Torn” by Natalie Imbruglia on repeat—Clara didn’t think it was useful to dwell.
But Jess wanted to dwell, to talk as though words were a spiral through which she might make her way to the essence of her experience. “It’s grief, I think. But I’m so confused. Because what am I grieving? How can you grieve a thing you never wanted? Or at least I didn’t want it now. Not like this.”
And Clara understood this part. Not the lyrics about being naked on the floor—she’d finally turned off the CD player—but about what Jess was going through, the seeming contradiction that wasn’t. “No, I know,” she said. “I mean, I want to have kids one day.”
