Helen inhaled sharply, knowing it would hurt.
“It’ll be fun,” Joanne said, smiling sadly, squeezing Helen’s hand.
“I think I will come,” Helen said, her voice sounding slow and dreamlike. “But I don’t think I could allow myself to have fun.”
NO ONE COULD look Helen in the eye. It was, she thought, as if they all knew something deep and dark about her, something horrifying. Even her own mother seemed to brighten when Helen told her she was going to spend the summer in upstate New York with Joanne. “Good for you,” her mother said, cheerfully. Helen used to think Joanne’s life was mysterious—artists! Scott worked in human resources at a bank; Helen taught composition at the junior college. When she’d told Joanne she was thinking about breaking up with Scott, Joanne had said, “I know a lot of interesting men.” Helen had imagined black turtlenecks, clove cigarettes, thick coffee in little cups. She packed to go, avoiding Scott’s drawers—the two top ones, his side of the closet. She pretended not to notice his Newsweek, so outdated now with Jackie Kennedy on the cover, folded open to the page where he’d left off the night before the accident. Scott would like that he died the same week as Jackie; it was the kind of thing he would have chosen. Helen’s hands brushed against his glasses, ugly aviator-shaped ones that he wore only in the house, at night. The cold metal and glass made her recoil, step back. His other pair, his public ones, must have been in his suit pocket, she thought. For a crazy moment she considered packing the aviator glasses, taking them with her to New York. She imagined them nestled in her suitcase among her sweaters and socks and hiking boots. Her hand reached for them, sitting there on top of black and white pictures of a young, happy Jackie. But instead of picking them up, her hand hung there for a moment, suspended in midair, then dropped, heavily, to her side.
EVERYONE AT THE artists’ colony assumed Joanne and Helen were lesbians.
A sculptor who “worked in wire” told Helen that every lesbian he knew wore shoes like hers.
A muralist named Ali told Helen that she had loved women at different times in her life. “When it was appropriate.”
There was a nightly cocktail party followed by a slide show of one of the artists’ work. The muralist painted familiar comic strip characters with their genitalia showing—Snoopy, Nancy, Cathy. Helen felt that she did not understand anything anyone was doing there. Everyone had come alone, except for a man named Andrew, who wouldn’t tell her what he worked in. “That kind of question offends me,” he said. Andrew had brought his children and a young nanny that everyone assumed he was sleeping with. His children were named Monday and Tuesday and were pasty skinned and sullen; the nanny, Danielle, was plump and cheerful, with honey-blond hair and bright eyes. Andrew, Helen decided, looked unclean. Like a man who didn’t wash.
The slide show the first night was the work of a woman named Leila. Leila painted the names of body parts on wood along with their definition, function, and other meanings they might have. Helen was a little drunk by the time the slide show began, drunk in the way you can only get from too much sweet white wine and not enough food. She watched Leila’s slides loom in front of her on the wall. LIVER, she read. A LARGE COMPOUND, TUBULAR, VERTEBRATE GLAND . . . The words jumped crazily and Helen had to close her eyes for an instant. ONE WHO LIVES IN A SPECIFIC MANNER, she read when she opened them again.
Then the slide changed abruptly and Helen was faced with a bigger than life definition of SPLEEN. She gasped. THIS ORGAN CONSIDERED AS THE SEAT OF MIRTH, MERRIMENT, CAPRICE.
“I lost my spleen,” Helen whispered to the person next to her. In the dark, she could not make out who it was. She didn’t even care. She was overwhelmed by guilt and some other unnameable emotion—grief, perhaps?
The person beside her leaned in so close to Helen that their shoulders touched. It was Danielle, the nanny. Helen felt Danielle’s hair against her neck.
“Awesome,” Danielle whispered back.
Foolishly, Helen grabbed Danielle’s soft hand. It felt like freshly kneaded dough, begging Helen to press it, which she did, aggressively.
“Do you think that means I’ve lost my ability for happiness?” Helen asked her. She was no longer whispering. In fact, several people had turned around in their seats to glare.
Danielle remained unnerved. “I never knew,” she said, keeping her own voice low, “that spleens were so expendable. Like an appendix. Or tonsils. I thought if you lost your spleen you’d die.”
Helen was gulping air too quickly. Soon she would have the hiccups. That was what happened when she got nervous. She would get hiccups that nothing could stop—not holding her breath or being frightened or large spoonfuls of sugar.
“No,” Helen managed to say. “You can die from multiple head injuries.”