It wasn’t that I didn’t want Sid to know. Part of me longed to tell her war stories, tell her of Boris’s barn, the half-finished art more erotic than his dry, anticlimactic kisses, or Robert, always in his suit and tie when he met me at the motel room we rented each week, or the time I got a rash from the sawdust on Thomas’s hands. I wanted to tell her about my obsession with David and how our romance was so intoxicating that I was ready to leave my whole life, including her.
I also wanted to keep my own secrets. It was a pact I held with myself, a game. If I didn’t tell anybody about certain things in my life （notably the things that I would most like to divulge） then, like the men who hold themselves back from orgasm to preserve their life force, I would accumulate some inexplicable strength.
In the corner of my eye I saw Sid bite her thumbnail and tear off a sheaf, layered like mica.
“Let’s cut your nails when you get home.”
“Let’s?”
“Cut your nails when you get home.”
“What about Lena?” I felt her eyes scrutinizing my face.
“Who?”
“Lena the babysitter, the one I had growing up.”
“Your father never did anything with Lena.”
“Yes he did. I saw them, I remember, it’s an early memory. I came into the kitchen and I saw his head in her neck and his hands wrapped around her, and she was giggling. She saw me and pushed his hands off her. I remember I asked if he was trying to get something from her pocket, and they both laughed.”
“That was me.”
“No it wasn’t.”
“Yes it was.”
“I remember what I saw.”
“No, sweetheart, you don’t remember it right.” And I told her how when she was little, John had been groping me in the kitchen as he was wont to do, and she came in and asked that exact question. And he had said, “Yes, I’m trying to get something from your mom’s pocket,” and she had said, “Give it to him, Mom,” and he had leered and said, “Yeah, Mom. Give it to me.”
“You know how unreliable memories are, my love,” I told her, but Sid just shook her head.
When we arrived home, John was gone again. I hardly minded, though this was the second night he had left the house without telling me where he was going. Sid had a bottomless hangover stomach, the kind that can be fed and fed and never gets full, so when we returned I warmed the carbonara sauce waiting in the fridge with fresh pasta and eggs and we shared a bottle of Malbec. She went to bed and I brought my laptop and cigarettes outside. There was an email from Edwina, apologizing for failing to confirm our appointment, telling me it was a busy time, telling me how much she valued my mentorship, asking if we could reschedule when things calmed down. Though I had completely forgotten we were supposed to meet, I was slightly offended. It seemed unlike her not to fix a new date. But then again, I expected my students to have dips and peaks in maturity and accountability, and I wrote her telling her not to worry and of course, and signed it with x’s and o’s. An email from John appeared, with the subject “D-Day.” Where was he that he was forwarding emails? In the dark in his office? His face illuminated by the blue light of his computer? Alone in some bar with his phone? It was the date for the first day of the dismissal hearing that would decide if he could stay on with the college: October 20.
I lit a cigarette and drew hard into my chest, letting the smoke permeate all the little crooks and spaces of my lungs. Students were innocent to tobacco nowadays, they called smoking a death wish, considered it a suicidal tendency. Many of them had no idea what it felt like, they thought tobacco affected your mental state, like marijuana. October 20—why was that date so familiar? Sid, mercifully, hadn’t brought up that she saw me smoking. She said she remembered going into the pool, but besides that the whole encounter was blurred in her brain. To my knowledge, she never found out that I had smoked. I had kept it secret from her, because I didn’t want her, when she was fifteen or eighteen, to have some image of me, in the past, smoking mysteriously. Nothing is more alluring than a mother-before-she-was-a-mother, an unknowable and irresistible figure. My own mother smoked until I was ten. After she quit, she struggled with an excess forty pounds until she died. I started smoking at fourteen when her Australian colleague offered my best friend Alice and me a cigarette in the parking lot of a company picnic. I was crazy for his height and his sunburn and his accent and his white-blond hair. He taught us how to suck in, hold the smoke in our lungs, and release. I prided myself on not coughing. After a few drags, Alice stood up and passed out briefly from the head rush, and the man and I, I forget his name, carried her into the shade and pepped her back up with Hi-C and ice cubes. Once she revived, we chased and teased each other, dropping ice cubes down each other’s shirts. As the summer went on he hung around the two of us more and more, and we smoked and mixed the rum and vodka he brought us with pineapple juice and ice. One night when my mother was out with her boyfriend and my sisters were off on a beach trip with friends, he and Alice came over and we sat on the couch to watch the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. He had both of his hands on our legs during the long jumps, and up our shorts during the sprints. By the time we were watching now–Caitlyn Jenner set the world record for the decathlon, we were squirming horizontal on the itchy woolen couch. I remember I had one breast exposed and another still in my white lace bra, and I didn’t know whether I should undo the whole thing—if I looked ridiculous or asymmetrically appealing. At a certain point, he guided my hand to his penis. Not knowing exactly what to do with it, I jerked it wildly until he took my hand off and pushed me away. I fell off the narrow couch onto the floor. I had the feeling of failing a test, and watched as he kissed and groped Alice, who, always more knowledgeable than I, held him expertly. Disgusted with myself, I retreated to my bedroom, leaving them entwined, and cried myself to sleep with self-pity. That was my last summer in Texas.
The moon reflected on the pool. I made a mental note to call the guy to come and cover it this week. Oh God, still so much self-hatred could ripple out from those adolescent memories. Always the shame, not of being too fast or engaging with a perverted Australian man who was at least thirty, but of being laughable—of being a slightly chubby girl of fourteen with one fat-nippled breast hanging out of a bad brassiere and not knowing how to give a hand job. Some of my students, when they read Victorian or Edwardian novels, would become so angry at all these heroes and heroines whose lives are ruined because they are afraid of embarrassment, but I did not know of any emotion more powerful, more permeating, more upending than that. You could die seemingly pointlessly or loveless to avoid shame, but shame could also make you feel as though you wanted to die, as I still felt, forty-four years later, when I pictured myself on the floor, looking at the beige strands of our wall-to-wall carpet as Alice and the Australian writhed above me. Then I remembered why October 20 was so familiar: it was, of course, the day of my lunch date with Vladimir.
IX.
Without any formal discussion or request, Sid stayed on with us the following week, mostly shut up in the guest room, emerging every once in a while to jog or to make food. She was considerate, overly so, her consideration a way to keep us at an arm’s length. She didn’t have a car but ordered groceries and beer to be delivered to the house and washed her dishes immediately after each use and did small chores like taking out the garbage and rotating the laundry. I say “us,” but I only knew for a fact that she kept her distance from me. She and John might have been having heart-to-heart discussions whenever they were alone, I didn’t know. Whether it was being back in her childhood bedroom, or because I had somehow failed to be the confidante she’d wished for, after that day at the diner she became as aloof as a teenager. In the unlikely occurrence that we were all home together, we moved around the house hushed and with care, like silent monks on balance beams. I had a futon in my office that I made up as a bed for myself. When Sid learned I wasn’t sleeping in the Big Bedroom she offered to switch with me, but I insisted that I preferred having unlimited access to the office, and as long as I had enough pillows the futon caused only minimal damage to my back.