Willa & Hesper Read online

  Willa kept her eyes on me as I read; my voice cracked on the word pulsing. Laughter rolled toward us from behind the closed glass door. I took a long sip from a bathroom-sized Dixie cup of tepid water. I wanted to be less nervous. I wanted to care as little as I’d cared all through undergrad, when a professor noticed me texting underneath my individual desk in a lecture hall. But this was different. What you chose to write was a statement on what you thought was important, or at the very least, it was an avenue into what you thought about. Everyone already knew that Marisa was obsessed with her cousin, and Ingrid described alcoholics with too much detail to be a casual observer. Willa’s story, which had been about the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor who discovered her girlfriend was cheating on her with a White supremacist, also contained the residue of truth.

  Willa raised her hand. “I love the way Hesper takes objects and makes interesting verbs out of them, like ‘marionette-d’ on page ten. I think it’s a really smart choice to contrast with the conservatism of the mother’s career and personality.”

  She’d read the comment, word for word, off of the top of her page. I could tell, and it endeared me to her like nothing else had. I pinched a smile gratefully in her direction.

  “Can I say something?” Megan said. “I don’t know what this story is. Why do we need another story about a teenage girl experiencing her first orgasm? Can’t teenage girls do something outside of sexual awakenings? Why couldn’t she become a coder, or get involved in robotics? And who could possibly love a turtle this much?”

  “I don’t think that having a female-centered coming-of-age story without a male love interest is trite,” Willa said. She’d never spoken this much in class before and her whole face bunched with pink splotches. “And why should we center the experience of someone inclined toward mathematics as a more valuable perspective?”

  “I had a turtle,” Ingrid said. “I loved it. I mean, not like this, but—”

  “And the mother,” Megan said, with a sigh. “What’s her motivation?”

  “She’s inert,” Willa said. “It’s a commentary on the motivation that she’s lost throughout her life.” Willa stared in Megan’s direction. “At the end, there’s a note of hope when she takes the clarinet back to her room, implying that maybe she’ll learn to play it herself.”

  “The clarinet is a symbol for hope?” Megan asked. “Come on.”

  “Whether or not you feel the clarinet is a worthwhile instrument is not the discussion,” Willa said, dipping into a tone of hostility that I hadn’t heard from her before, and I could feel the gratitude all over, like pain. “We’re supposed to evaluate each story on the terms the writer sets in the opening pages. The clarinet is important. It’s on page one.”

  “Good gravy,” the professor said. “Let’s hear from someone on a non-clarinet issue.”

  “I feel like— Am I the only one who thought the daughter might be dead?” Ingrid asked. “Like, is she the turtle?”

  “Great,” the professor said. “Let’s go with that.”

  * * *

  AFTER CLASS, MY CLASSMATES (not including Megan) spilled into the hallway and stood in a glob, weakly exchanging compliments and reassurances in my direction. Ingrid told me more about her pet turtle, who was named Curtis. Willa stood protectively next to me, a thick pile of workshop submissions camouflaging her chest. I could feel her, evaluating my reactions, the slippery smile on my face that felt it might slide right off if I didn’t concentrate on seeming fine. I was. I was fine. It was a stupid class in which overly invested intellectuals tossed around theories about fictional people who didn’t mean anything to me. That’s all it was. Somebody laughed and I laughed, too, my gaze focused on a blackboard with a Toni Morrison quote: If there’s a book you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.

  “Sorry, I have to— See you guys,” I said, my voice frosted with faux-casualness. I waved.

  “Like a literal bloodbath,” I heard Ingrid say as I headed down the main staircase. “Well, not a literal bloodbath.”

  I stood in the foyer of the Creative Writing building, with its TV screen by the vending machine boasting of previous graduates’ success, and the guy who worked at the snack counter with its individually wrapped Macintosh apples, and even though I wanted to leave desperately, I couldn’t get my feet to work. I coated and recoated my lips in citrus-scented gloss. Through the glass doors, I could see the familiar oak trees, the tall, marble columns where, though the smokers themselves were hidden, I could watch plumes of cigarette smoke phantom into the sky.

  “Quite the getaway,” Willa teased behind me. “Hey. Are you okay?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Your hair is stuck in your lip gloss,” she said, tenderly unsticking my hair from my face.

  “Thanks.”

  “Let’s get you immersed in some trees,” she said, nodding in the direction of Riverside Park.

  “Don’t be too nice to me,” I warned. “You can be nice, just not extra. Like, five out of ten.”

  She nodded. We scattered from the building, careful to look so engrossed in conversation that our classmates turned into unrecognizable shadows, coagulated on seating next to our building. Down the colossal, iconic Columbia steps, we navigated around undergrads carrying salads in clear plastic domes, across Broadway toward the park. Grand brick buildings with seafoam green roofs looked golden in the sun. At the water’s edge, trees heavy with ivory and peachy blossoms sunk, crooked over a row of benches. We sat there, looking at the texture of the Hudson chopping along with its serene, chemical-tainted water. I slipped off my shoes, crisscrossed myself on the bench until my thigh muscles ached from the stretch.

  “Not to be a bad feminist, but Megan really is a bitch,” Willa said finally. I laughed.

  “She really doesn’t like clarinets. Or turtles.”

  “You know what’s weird?” Willa said. “I don’t find any comfort in looking at water. Even though it’s been, like, scientifically proven to reduce stress and create that feeling of awe of nature, I just…don’t see it.”

  “Really? What do you see?”

  Willa shrugged. “Live action wallpaper.”

  I laughed. “What?” I said, lingering on the surface of the river. Although I knew it wasn’t, the water looked completely still. The sky above the current was dusted with mist. I missed San Francisco, the way that the fog veiled the Golden Gate Bridge’s red paint in swatches of translucent gray. The Hudson didn’t compare to the ocean, the scent of the salt in my nostrils. But it helped. It made me feel small, and manageable. It made the wary anxiety that snagged throughout workshop fade.

  “You’re incredulous.”

  “I won’t deny that. And, also…I meant to say before,” I offered. “Thank you for defending me.” Willa laid her hand out on the bench between us like a starfish. She bristled, then smiled past it, as I inspected her hand like it was a road map. She had a beauty mark, or some kind of freckle, on the right side of her palm. “I wanted to say something else.”

  Her eyes felt welded to mine. Dark with vigilance.

  “I’ve never had a girlfriend,” I said. “I mean…you would be my first. I’ve wanted one, I’m not, like…wavering in what I want. It’s just never worked out, exactly.”

  Willa opened her mouth to say something but then didn’t. The extent of my vulnerability revealed itself in a somersault below my ribs. It wasn’t doubt that she felt the same; it was doubt that, by voicing it, something would go wrong. Possibilities of catastrophe inflated as soon as you spoke it, that much I knew. I plucked a dandelion that had clustered in the grass near our feet, a little yellow lollipop, and handed it to her. Willa’s hand quavered. But her face was gridded with tentative joy.

  “So now you know,” I said.

  She gazed at me, adoringly but unblinking, as if seeing a premonition. “Now I know,” she said.

  3.

  With every new love interest, there was research to be done. It
was tradition. Chloe bought Red Vines and bit both ends so they’d work as straws for boxed cabernet sauvignon, and I clustered onto her bed with our laptops next to each other. Though our apartment was on the first floor and every conversation on the stoop was audible from Chloe’s exuberantly plush-pillowed bed, I felt sequestered. We snooped. A kaleidoscope of Hesper’s past: her emerald green prom dress, her summer working as a camp counselor, a throwback photo of her as a baby, swaddled by a diaphanous orange pumpkin outfit. There was a ten-year limit on Facebook stalking, Chloe decreed, but Hesper was younger than we were. Ten years earlier, she’d been twelve.

  “She’s a baby,” Chloe said. “Twenty-two.”

  “That’s only four years younger than us.”

  “Yeah, but four years can be a lot. Four years ago I didn’t own a pair of flats. Plus, you know. Emotional maturity.”

  “She’s emotionally mature,” I argued. “And so beautiful. Don’t you think she’s so beautiful?”

  “She’s so squinty in this picture,” Chloe said, turning the laptop toward me for confirmation. “Like the flash is a solar eclipse or something. But yes, on a whole. Super beautiful. And that letter was dreamy, Will. She just snuck that in your mailbox?”

  I flushed. “It was a thank you for helping her with her story.” But she hadn’t just said thank you, I thought, the love-potential flurrying across my thoughts so that I was somewhere else, a quiet room with Hesper’s voice low in my ear, so that all other sensory input had been muted and it was just me, and Hesper’s voice, thanking me. Closing the letter with the admission: I keep thinking of you and I can’t stop. —H

  Last month, I’d lived in my childhood bedroom, its walls painted a juvenile shade of bubblegum. Pictures of friends that I’d stopped speaking to years earlier were clipped into photo holders adorned with tropical fish from bar and bat mitzvah favors. Last month I’d been in charge of pleasant dinnertime conversation topics because Mom was usually mad and Dad was starting to drift off, drift away, three white pills and his pain abated but not enough to concentrate, to follow a thread. Last month I’d packed a suitcase full of loose cotton T-shirts and leggings, leather boots that came up to the knee, and moved seven miles away to live with Chloe, who already had furniture and dish towels and bowls from Anthropologie in dainty Victorian florals. Now we were drunk on wine and straws fashioned from candy, and I had a letter that was…not exactly a love letter, but not not a love letter either, from a perfect person who squinted excessively in photos. I had everything. A best friend, a story that had been relatively well received in workshop, a work study job at the library that paid enough to cover groceries and utilities and student loan checks to cover the rest, mostly. I knew it wasn’t really my money but it felt real, seeing a five-digit number in my checking account for the very first time. And what use did it do to worry about after graduation, anyway? The MFA program directors told us, that first day at orientation: these two years were to focus on becoming a real writer. To become a real version of yourself.

  Chloe touched my arm and I felt the touch travel from my arm to my shoulder to my chest. Underneath my bra’s wires, I felt the bruise’s tenderness, reminding me of what had happened. But I didn’t have to remember, I thought. I could pretend; people did all the time. People came home to their spouses and pretended the thing that bound them together was love, not obligation. People took sugar pills that cured their depression and anxiety. I just had to harness my brain.

  “Jumpy much?” Chloe asked.

  “You know I’m a skittish drunk,” I said, trying to laugh.

  “Are you?” Chloe asked. “Usually you’re full of hugs.”

  It was too late to tell Chloe. It was too late because she’d ask why I had waited so long, and I didn’t have an answer, and every day the problem compounded itself. Except there was no problem. There was nothing but Hesper, frame after frame of Hesper with different hairstyles, different college sweatshirts, smiling in poorly lit hallways or in front of rolling, lush Californian hills.

  I clicked next. “Oh, she had late-2000s bangs!” I continued. “Perfect. I’m starting to think that she’s the perfect human. Can’t you just imagine it? Us in a little cabin in the Pacific Northwest, reading novels next to each other in matching red flannels. Or…us at one of those bed-and-breakfasts on an alpaca farm, petting their fluffy heads.”

  “You can stay at a bed-and-breakfast on an alpaca farm?” Chloe asked. “Why haven’t I made Graham take me to one of those for our anniversary? I want an alpaca friend.”

  I laughed. “The alpaca friend is a bonus.”

  Chloe adjusted her glasses and smiled. She twisted to face me. “You’re about to become so annoying, you know that? One of those people that’s like, ‘oh my gosh, did you say you liked cantaloupe? My girlfriend loves cantaloupe.’ Everything will be an invitation to boast about your great romance.”

  “Chlo,” I said, giggling before I could deliver the joke. “Actually, my girlfriend is allergic to cantaloupe. It makes her throat tingle.”

  “It begins,” Chloe whispered. “It…has…begun. Let’s invite her over.” Chloe straightened, rustling a litany of notebooks that occupied the bed space. “Let’s have a party tonight! Marisa and Ingrid and Liam went to get hot pot in Alphabet City but we’re supposed to meet up later, around ten.”

  “I’m opening the library at eight-fifteen tomorrow. Besides”—I felt the smile controlling my face—“Hesper said she’s going to meet me after my shift for some kind of surprise day.”

  “Stop,” Chloe said, but she was smiling at my happiness. She was a good friend. “That’s too much. Fine. I’ll have the party without you and recap it all to you in enormous detail. I guarantee Liam will end up with something in that beard. It’s like a pantry in there.”

  “That’s disgusting,” I said, but my tone was ebullient. Chloe kissed my cheek.

  * * *

  THROUGHOUT MY SHIFT AT the library, I itched. I catalogued every instance of contact that I’d had so far with Hesper’s body. I stamped little white cards reminding students to return their reserved materials to the main desk in two hours or less and sneakily slurped iced coffee from the shelf that dug into my knees as I sat in an angled-too-high computer chair and asked patron after unruly patron if I could help them, that the library closed at five today, that the bathrooms were to the left. Folding, unfolding my hands, as if in prayer. Then I actually said a prayer. Thank you for leading me to this, I thought. But again, a weird hollowness came where I’d once felt grasped by the warm company of believing. Maybe it was nothing. It was busy in the library, and I was distracted. That’s all it was: to feel distracted by the early embers of love. It was Willa Greenberg day.

  The cadence of Hesper’s voice.

  Those little white teeth.

  I keep thinking of you and I can’t stop. —H

  * * *

  HESPER WAS WEARING A jean jacket, a velvet leotard, and patterned navy-and-scarlet pants that somehow all unified to seem fashionable, perfectly meshed together into an outfit, although I didn’t understand how they worked, exactly. She had another dandelion, a twin to the one that she’d pulled from the grass for me earlier that week. I wore what a mother of three young children might throw on to go get cereal, I thought, tugging the V-neck down over my hips. Hesper seemed aglow, effortlessly rosy, with a leather tote bag over her shoulder and a striped thermos in hand. “Willa Greenberg,” she greeted.

  “It’s you,” I said.

  “It’s me! So, are you ready for your dream day?” Hesper asked. “I brought coffee!”

  I accepted. It was strangely sugared and clumped down my throat, but was also perfect, because everything that Hesper coordinated had a ring of surrealism around it, as if my real life had been paused and this better, impossibly auspicious replacement was running for a limited time before the regular version would pick up where it left off, with me back in my childhood bedroom in New Jersey pretending not to eavesdrop on Mom complaining to Aunt Sylvi
a that part of her wished he would have just died in that accident, right off the bat, instead of this new, feeble replacement husband that would never work again.

  Before the accident, and the decline that followed, he’d been a fastidious lawyer, juggling a multitude of mergers and acquisitions. An office that overlooked a courtyard. A complimentary gym membership he never had time to use. He’d been a workaholic, sneaking glimpses of his cell phone at all occasions. Mom had loved that version of him, the one that was never satisfied by any level of achievement and had three different leather belts. She was an office manager who’d worked at a nonprofit, but it wasn’t enough to support a family of three, and she’d moved to work at a start-up where she was the oldest person by thirty years and the most miserable on staff, and perpetually searching for a new, stealthier income with better benefits for Dad, who could no longer even follow the plot of Law & Order. But that had been a different Willa’s life.

  “Is this regular sugar?” I asked, over the sound of myself, churning.

  “I had to improvise on the sugar. Is it palatable?” Hesper touched my hand, retrieving the thermos. “Oh, no. This won’t do for Willa Greenberg day.” She uncapped the thermos and the coffee splashed onto the cement, a rush. Hesper looked at it, pleased somehow. There was something a little theatrical about her, I thought; a way that her actions felt special, defined. Outside of the subway entrance, my hair stirring in the Tuesday breeze, Hesper leaned forward and kissed me, one hand on the small of my back, and it made me feel like I was dissolving.

  “I never plan anything. You should know that. But today…today, I have a plan,” Hesper whispered, and I saw that when our faces were this close, I could see the slight movement of Hesper’s irises, flickering according to the supply of light. I kept my nose against Hesper’s nose. I was curious about the plan, but I wanted to preserve this, the moment, I wanted it to last just the tiniest bit longer before we separated. I stood there against the cold metal rail at the entrance of the subway. We were inseparable, I thought, and everyone who stepped around us realized it; it was that obvious; it was palpable and luminescent. It was Willa Greenberg day.