A Taxonomy of Barnacles, page 10
Still, she made a mighty effort at optimism. To that end, she switched genres. Her life, she decided, was not a romance, but rather an edge-of-your-seat mystery, the center of which was the paternity of her unborn child. Of course, there were other deep burning questions, such as whether she would ever get out of bed and, of course, how, in God’s name, she was going to fix her life. Due to one particularly drunken week three months ago, Bell had finally done irreparable damage. When she looked back on that week, she could neither remember how she’d made it to bed nor with whom. Would that Blaine had been in her bed, she thought, switching genres yet again. Her life would be a raunchy bodice-ripper if Blaine Finch III, the boy next door, were the father of her child. Comforted, Bell drifted back to sleep for a precious minute. But she was jolted awake by a disturbing realization: Her life was a gripping whodunit in which the “it” was sex.
Consciousness came on around ten o’clock. Bell spent her first blurry waking hour staring intently at her bedroom wall as though it hid, in hieroglyphics, the answers to life’s mysteries. Within minutes, she felt as she had in sleep, stomped on by worry. The decor of her childhood bedroom did her no favors, its candy pink walls a sneery reminder of her once-rosy outlook. Posters and clippings taped to the walls were in on the joke as well, dating her childhood with the accuracy of an archaeologist. A stack of records she and Bridget had amassed, once coveted, now presented a difficult ethical dilemma, to hock or not to hock. Cluttered trophies, once proud emblems of a shiny future, had transformed into a crowd of spectators cheering her downfall. Her entire bedroom had been preserved as a monument to her early promise. One object in particular stood out.
For ten years straight, a Yankees hat had perched atop her bedpost. It was not a souvenir from a game, but rather a keepsake given to her by Blaine one very memorable night. The night of the twins’ sixteenth birthday marked a momentous event, as surprising for the two eldest Barnacle girls as for the history of science. Though the boys had exhibited bizarre twin behavior since the moment they were born, this night they acted in such uncanny synchrony, were graced with such scary telepathy that it truly seemed that the two boys shared the very same brain. Though one would expect environment to whittle them apart by this age, the boys proved to be as linked as ever as they clambered up their neighbors’ fire escape without ever discussing such a plan, and crept into Bell and Bridget’s window, one ten minutes after the other.
At ten of midnight, Billy climbed in the window and tiptoed across the room then took a seat on the edge of Bridget’s bed and gently shook her shoulder.
“Bridget, will you marry me someday?” he asked. He gripped the comforter nervously as he waited for her response. Lacking a ring, he offered his most valuable possession: his official Red Sox cap.
Unfortunately, Bridget said no and laughed off her hammy friend. Still, she submitted to Billy’s request and followed him down the fire escape for a night of underage drinking.
At midnight, Blaine climbed in the same window and tiptoed across the room, and then took a seat on the edge of Bell’s bed and gently tapped her arm.
Lacking a ring, he offered his most valuable possession: an official Yankees cap. “Bell, will you marry me someday?” he asked.
But Bell said yes before Blaine said “someday” and she meant it wholeheartedly, too. Even at this tender age, she already understood the nature of this contract. Deciding to hold Blaine to his commitment whenever someday arrived, she placed the cap on her bedpost as a jog to her memory. Guessing that Bridget would be out until morning, she invited Blaine to stay for the night.
Ever since, she cherished her Yankees cap, treating it as collateral of sorts. She used it as a reader would a bookmark, to hold the place of an important chapter, a favorite scene from her life. She wore it all the time, while she studied, at movies, sometimes to sleep. But she was always careful not to wear it in Blaine’s vicinity, fearful of betraying her obsession. Instead, Bell packed the cap in a bag whenever she left the house, sometimes walking several blocks before putting it on her head.
Now, Bell decided, the cap had taken on new meaning. It no longer served as a token from a past romance, but rather as a promissory note, a coupon, an IOU. Perhaps, Bell thought hopefully, Blaine had not forgotten his meaningful gift. Perhaps it had been given in expectation of their long separation, in acknowledgment of life’s cruel twists and turns, in anticipation of the day when Bell would call on her claim, when her patient love would be rewarded, when she would finally collect. In an instant, Bell revised her life story and hope swirled into her heart. The last ten years had not been a series of delays and missed opportunities. Rather, this time had been a necessary hibernation, just penance for the privilege of perfect love. She had de-evolved, Bell realized now, to another kind of type. First, she was a winner, then she was a quitter, and now, she decided with a deep proud breath, she was … well, she wasn’t sure yet.
At least it was Saturday, Bell reasoned, that was one comforting fact. On weekdays the city was too quiet; her thoughts, as a result, too loud in her head, each one echoing there for hours like some wild thing, howling. On weekdays, it was impossible to ignore her alienation from the planet. On weekdays, she could not forget the fact that everyone she knew was hard at work, that she could not get a job despite, she thought, her very impressive credentials. It seemed the only task she could accomplish lately was making her bed, and even this was a struggle. Her former boss had seconded this notion when she fired Bell three weeks earlier, suggesting that Bell was perhaps more suited to a job in a creative arena. Did creative arenas, Bell wondered, extend all the way to one’s bed? Luckily, on Saturdays, these were not her concerns. On Saturdays, the whole world joined Bell in her day of rest.
“Bell.” The voice was high and shrill despite its apparent distance. The voice, Bell noted, as it approached, did not sound entirely unlike a bell, except not the tinkling silvery kind, but rather the kind used to signal the end of class or a five-alarm fire. “Barry said you wanted to wake up early.” Bunny was clearly as annoyed as Bell to be enlisted in such distasteful work.
“I never said that,” Bell managed to yell, though her vocal cords were not quite up to the task.
“He said you wanted to get an early crack at the want ads,” Bunny added.
“It’s Saturday,” Bell moaned. Then, realizing this statement was not self-explanatory, she added, “It’s my day of rest.”
A chorus of angels might as well have joined in harmonious reply. Five voices united from their bedrooms to put Bell in her place. “It’s Friday,” one voice yelled.
“It’s Friday.”
“It’s Friday.”
“It’s Friday.”
Humbled, Bell closed her eyes again and resumed her effort to blot reality out. Unfortunately, closing her eyes brought her yet closer to her muddled thoughts, forcing the searing self-analysis she hoped to avoid. Once, long ago, Bell had been the kind of girl who found life delicious. She had felt and expressed, on a daily basis, delight and wonderment. When it snowed, she was the first to run outside and throw her arms in the air, to gaze up at the sky with real gratitude, cupping her hands and sticking out her tongue so as to catch falling snowflakes. She was the first to call her friends on their birthdays. She coined new holidays all the time and, when she was in a particularly good mood, even invented new drinks. (Her personal favorite was a refreshing winter beverage whose recipe called for fresh New York City snow.)
When it was nice out, she was the first to say what a lovely day it was, to smile instructively at those people who seemed not to have noticed yet. She always watched the weather report, so she knew when to bring an umbrella and when to make alternate plans. She was rarely late, she paid her bills on time, and, on those occasions when she did receive a gift, she wrote long, personal thank-you letters in an impressively prompt amount of time. Indeed, Bell was one of those rare creatures who appreciated life before living much of it, who valued her friends and family before losing any of them. Now, years later, she was truly hard-pressed to remember the girl she used to be and, what’s more, found that girl annoyingly earnest and naive.
At least, Bell decided, she could take comfort in the fact that one skill had remained intact: She could still complete the New York Times crossword puzzle with a ballpoint pen. On a good day, it took her a couple of hours. On Sunday, it took the whole day. Either way, Bell proudly eschewed pencil and managed, with a few inconspicuous smudges, to complete the puzzle in ink. Encouraged by this fact, Bell did her best to entomb herself in her bed and, within minutes, managed to make serious progress on the puzzle. She knew twelve across immediately: Leda’s beaked seducer was Zeus. Twenty-five down came easily, too: Famous brothers in baseball were Don and Joe DiMaggio. At least, Bell decided, the trivia she had accumulated, though essentially worthless in life, was valuable for something.
Indeed, Bell could claim a whole host of useless information at her fingertips. She could recite Yeats’s poem, “Leda and the Swan” by heart and understood the mythological allusions. She knew that Castor and Pollux, the “Gemini twins,” were not actually twins, but half brothers. She knew that the twins abducted a pair of sisters named Phoebe and Hilaria, who were also known, in Greek mythology, as the morning and evening twilight. She knew how the boys were punished for this act, that Pollux was killed by the girls’ husbands, and that Castor, bereft without his twin, begged Zeus to let him die, too, so he could rejoin his brother. She knew Zeus took pity on the boys and struck a compromise, allowing the boys to split the duties of the Gemini constellation, one standing guard during the day while the other took his post at night.
Bell knew that the best tennis players in history were also a pair of twins, that the Rinsey brothers only rose to greatness after their competitors, the Doherty brothers, also twins, were killed in World War I. She knew that Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams were tied for the highest RBI in Yankees history; that the emu had been an endangered species since 1973, two years longer than the manatee. She could tell you the names of all nine muses, the seven colors in the electromagnetic spectrum, the abbreviations for every element on the periodic table. She could tell you how to calculate the volume of a parallelogram, the length of the hypotenuse of an isosceles triangle, the exponential change in a parabolic function and the area underneath. She could recite the dates of Europe’s major wars. She could hold her own on Renaissance art. She could recite, in Old English, the first verse of the Canterbury Tales and, if pressed, the preamble to the Constitution. She knew where the eustachian tube was found, that the human eye had seven parts; three more than the heart. And yet, despite this wealth of knowledge, Bell still could not tell you, not if her life depended on it, how it felt to love someone and be loved back.
But rather than delay her progress on the puzzle, Bell quickly dismissed these troubling thoughts and, finding herself boxed in on the upper right side, yelled down the hall for some help.
“What do swans and human beings have in common?” she shouted.
“How many letters?” someone replied.
“Eight,” Bell yelled then, after counting, “Blank, blank, blank, ‘O’, ‘G’, blank, blank, blank.”
The voice said nothing for a moment.
Bell tried in vain to fit in “romance,” but to no avail.
“Monogamy,” said the voice.
Humbled, Bell filled in the letters. Then, setting the paper on her lap, she leaned forward and opened her shutters. And finding even sunlight joined the chorus of her critics, she decided to get out of bed.
Looking down, she was appalled by her appearance. Gone was the leggy and lithe woman of her college days, the swanlike turnout of an unusual, if not technically ugly, duckling. Born nine pounds and seven ounces, she had rivaled the massive Barnacle bird at her first Thanksgiving. But now her once formidable size could be counted as a liability. Her legs now lagged where they had once flown. Her cheeks now drooped instead of smiled. Her eyes, once bright and confident, had flattened to a dull gray. Even her skin had taken on a strange sickly color, as though subject to the same green tint of Belinda’s hair. With wind of the right force, her baggy plaid pajamas could have doubled as a hot air balloon. Her T-shirt emitted its own tangy smell. Her unwashed face added further contrast to the dark bags under her eyes. Her teeth felt disturbingly mossy when she ran her tongue across them. Her hair had gone now months without a cut and had reached that alarming length at which split ends and feathered tufts could be confused for a retro haircut. Still, she chose, she thought quite rationally, against changing her clothes. It would be dishonest, a cover-up of sorts. Nice clothes would be an inaccurate representation of her inner state. As though on cue, an old epithet echoed in her head. I’m failing, she thought. I don’t work anymore. I can’t cope.
Lately, Bell had found even the simplest task challenging: getting through a full day of work, going to the bank or for a run, shopping for groceries, paying her bills, communicating with delivery boys—even the cute one at the local Thai place who clearly had a crush on her. All of these things fatigued her so fully she wondered if she might be terribly ill. She was sure her friends were horribly wrong when they cheerfully insisted that this kind of fatigue was a classic sign of depression and therefore something that could be easily cured by today’s myriad drugs. Depression, Bell usually countered, was a euphemism for failure, a way to assuage colossal flame-outs about the magnitude of their flop, a nice name for everyone who had once promised to be a great writer and now had trouble writing a thank-you letter, let alone writing in a straight line.
What, Bell wanted to ask her friends, was the name of the disease she had, a disease whose insidious symptoms included an inability to get through a day of work without crying, to stand up again after sitting down for lunch, to make it through a dinner with friends without yearning to escape to the safety of one’s bed? What, Bell wondered, was the name for the disorder that compelled you to throw yourself at random boys in bars, to have sex with total strangers in the bathrooms of those bars, in cabs, in spare bedrooms at parties, and, once, in a subway car. What ailment caused you to cry at the slightest minor chord progression, whether in a favorite Beatles song or a credit card commercial? What sickness allowed you to get dressed for a run only to stop at your own front door; to say things you didn’t mean to say, to speak your mind when you really should be polite; to tell the most powerful editor at Gottesman that her biggest book was a flat, self-indulgent piece of crap that was not even fit to be scrap paper in the copy machine at which your time, your mind, and very expensive college education were flagrantly wasted? What sickness then caused you to laugh out loud after losing such ungainful employment, but only long enough to make it to the sidewalk and burst into tears?
Stumped by this onslaught of questions, Bell strained to reach the newspaper on the floor of her bedroom. It didn’t mater that it was three days old. Reading the newspaper was an act of rebellion against facts. She had no interest in the news or headlines; it was purely a diversion. She was the first to concede it was an odd and slightly maudlin habit. But in the last few years, she had changed her approach to reading the New York Times, replacing her perusal of the wedding announcements with a thorough scan of the obituaries. The two sections, she felt, were oddly similar, both providing snapshots of other lives narrated in euphemistic tones before they headed into eternal bliss. And yet, the change of habit represented a deeper change within Bell, marking the moment at which she realized that her chances of being featured in the former section were slimmer than the latter. So, it was with rapt interest and some measure of bias that she scoured the pithy paragraphs, noting effective prose and moving flourishes as though making a study of the genre.
Finding even this activity failed to lift her mood, she drew on another favorite pastime, removing a magazine from a pile on the floor and turning to the horoscope pages. “Natura non facit saltum.” She struggled to remember high-school Latin to interpret the advice of the stars. “Nature does not move in leaps and bounds.”
Indeed, Bell thought. Nature is a tortoise. Slow and steady wins the race. Satisfied, she turned to the forecast for Blaine. But before she could indulge in this petty fantasy, she was privy to an unwelcome and wholly unforecasted visit.
An angry rap at Bell’s window revealed an intruder. Due to her recent haircut and dye job, Belinda looked something like an alien as she cowered on the fire escape, her face pressed to Bell’s window-pane. With the overblown gestures of a silent film actress, Belinda desperately tried to explain through the glass just how cold it was outside and otherwise entreat Bell to grant her reentry. Apartment logistics had forced Belinda to find alternate modes of escape due to the fact that Barry’s office looked directly onto her window and Barry was, of course, an insomniac. Luckily, Bell and Bridget had left for college just as Belinda’s rebellious streak struck, leaving their bedroom available for use as a launching pad. It was true; rebelliousness was a uniform trait among the Barnacle girls. But Belinda, perhaps because she was born fourth, was four times as wild as the rest.
Too exhausted to protest, Bell opened the window. Belinda squeezed through expertly then proceeded to walk over Bell’s bed as though it had been draped with red carpet explicitly for her entry. She jumped to the ground with a small thud, smiled sweetly at Bell then, reaching covertly behind her back, attempted to steal Bell’s baseball hat.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Bell demanded.
“I need to borrow it,” Belinda said, “in order to cover my hair.” Belinda’s latest boyfriend, a senior at her own prep school, did not approve of Belinda’s coif. His argument, however, had more merit than the boy himself.
