“This is not good,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “I was supposed to come to you. I’m only at Garland because it’s free, and I have to paddle around in the baby pool until I graduate, but then I can come over to the deep end, with you.” He rolled toward her and propped his head up on his arm. “You’re not supposed to come back to the baby pool.”
“You sound like one of them,” she said. “New York is not the deep end of America. It just thinks it is.”
He sighed.
“I’m staying.” She touched her nose to his. “You are my home. We’re married. We’re not supposed to live apart.”
He was quiet for a long time, and she knew, with every silent second, that she was winning. His brow slackened, and they kissed on his twin bed like the teenagers they were, and when his mother called his name from downstairs, they stood up, straightened their clothes, and went downstairs to smile at all the neighbors.
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For Christmas, Grace had bought Riley a gray sweater and a book about historical houses. She’d picked them weeks before, and they now seemed cruel, as if she were mocking his Garland tastes, his Garland comfort. Alls walked through the kitchen as she was wrapping them, and her face burned. He kept going, right out the back door. They hadn’t spoken at all. As she gathered the paper scraps to throw away, it occurred to her that both she and Alls had always wanted Riley’s life, and whatever desire Alls had felt for her had only been an extension of his envy.
I am Riley’s cunt, she thought.
He hadn’t wanted Grace, but Riley’s Grace, and not even Riley’s Grace but Riley’s cunt. He’d only wanted Riley’s cunt.
Riley had gone to fetch her presents, hidden at his parents’ house, and he would be home soon. She tied the bows, curled the ribbon. How stupid she had been. She was ashamed at this turn in her misery.
You didn’t get two. She was lucky to have one, lucky he was the right one.
That night, Riley gave Grace a monograph on Van Gogh that she’d coveted the summer before. Now she was embarrassed by it. Van Gogh was just one cultural rung above the lamplit fairylands of Thomas Kinkade. But then Riley presented her with a painting of his own, a watercolor portrait of her. Her face nearly filled the paper as she leaned out toward the viewer. She was naked, but not much of her breasts could be seen at that angle. The paint itself was pale and delicate, dozens of layers of thin, filmy washes.
“What is this?” she whispered, running her fingers along the paper’s deckled edge.
“It’s you,” he said. “From the webcam. A screenshot. I hope you’re not mad—you were talking, and the crappy computer light had you totally washed out; you were almost glowing white, but you looked—”
Grace looked closely at her face. She must have been completely lost in what she was saying; she looked so unself-conscious.
“Beautiful,” he said. “You’re always beautiful.”
She was sure that this idea, a sincere watercolor portrait of his girlfriend based on a screenshot of a naked webcam chat, was the best thing Riley had ever painted, and far beyond what she’d thought him capable of. But the painting was also incontrovertible evidence that she was loved. He could never, ever know what she had done.
Why was it different, what she felt for Alls? Grace had loved Riley so much. She was an expert, an artisan, in the twin crafts of loving him and of being lovable. How was this any less honest than the other feeling, which felt more like the line in her fishing reel was spinning out away from her and she couldn’t stop it? That didn’t feel like any kind of love she knew. The line had all run out and the jolt had pulled her overboard.
Grace had learned to say I love you when she was just a child: first to her mother and father, then to Riley. Children learned to say I love you before they knew what it meant. They said I love you because their parents said it to them, and they returned it, a small gift passed back and forth. She had thought love was not so different from those other truths that became so once spoken: “I swear,” “I quit,” “I now pronounce you husband and wife.”
“I love you,” she told Riley then, and she meant it. She always had.
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Grace only slept at her parents’ house for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, when Riley slept at his family’s house. The twins ran in and out of the house in muddy snow boots with school-holiday urgency. Grace did her best to offer her parents cheerful thoughts about her semester and New York, a little about her job. She presented a few tidy anecdotes. Her father asked about that girl with the crazy hair.
At first, she didn’t tell them she wasn’t going back. She didn’t know how to say it, and they would see, soon enough. But on Christmas Day, she was alone in the kitchen with her father, his back to her, and he asked what classes she was taking next term.
“I’m not going back,” she said. “I’m enrolling here.”
He turned around, his hands dripping dish suds. “What? Why?”
“It’s too snobby,” she said. She could have sworn he looked proud.
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The day after New Year’s she went to her parents’ again to paw through her childhood dresser for talismans: old pictures, trinkets, silly gifts that represented who she had been and who she should’ve stayed. She could hardly remember her life before him, just the lonely murk of childhood, and so she couldn’t imagine being without him now. It was like being told that you wouldn’t mind dying because then you’d be dead. If she and Riley were not together, she would cease to exist.
She found photos of her and Riley when he still had braces, small drawings he had given to her on the backs of receipts, ribbed cotton sweaters so boring that she’d known to leave them behind. She took anything Kendall would laugh at, anything Lana would pity. Maybe they were worldlier, in a cultural sense, but really, they were babied by their parents and their trust funds and would be forever. Grace was an adult doing the adult thing: admitting defeat, moving forward.
She heard her mother’s voice behind her.
“Clearing out, I see.”
Grace started. “Oh, hi. I’m just picking up a few old things.”
Her mother uncrossed her arms to pick a piece of lint from her sweater. Grace had not really looked at her mother in such a long time, and now she was surprised at how girlish—soft, even—her mother looked. She had bobbed her hair, and in her ears were pink pearl studs. It was difficult for Grace to reconcile the woman in front of her with the image she held in her mind, the Ocean City party girl with bleached hair and sunburnt cleavage.
“I did what you’re doing,” her mother finally said. “When I was pregnant with you. I imagined showing you things from my childhood, you know.”
Then why hadn’t she? When did I first disappoint you? Grace wanted to ask. When you peed on the stick? Grace was now the same age her mother had been when Grace was born, and her mother, life derailed and forever resentful, had never so much as uttered the phrase birth control to her daughter. Now Grace wondered if her mother, in some dark corner of her mind, had wished that Grace would get pregnant. Then she would see.
“I knew you’d grow up,” her mother said. “It’s not that I didn’t think you’d grow up. You’ve always been very confident.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Grace said. By confident, her mother meant uppity.
“You didn’t need me,” her mother said.
How dare she, now? Grace had asked her parents for so little. She had mostly raised herself. And now that she was grown, her mother was going to blame her for it.
“You were very busy,” Grace said, her teeth clenched. “With the twins, with work.”
Her mother shook her head. Her arms were crossed, her eyes far away. “You didn’t need me,” she said. “Even when you were a little baby, you were very calm, very sensible. You didn’t mind who held you, if it was me or not. You’d go to anyone.” She laughed a little. “Babies are not sensible.”
You stupid, loveless woman, Grace thought.
“I’m sorry,” Grace said. None of this bore discussion.
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