Through the Baby-talk, a poem by Jason Pontillo '09
Old Stars, a poem by Alix Krzemien '08
Impossible Anonymous, a short story by Cara Cotter '10
Through the Baby-talk
By Jason Pontillo '09
Cooing as he's passed around, he is dropped
into my uneasy arms. It's my turn,
for some reason, to see the baby.
And I mind.
I've become a caricature,
some bad romantic comedy male foil, mimicking
the twitters and whistles,
perhaps to realize the potential
for love outside of myself.
It doesn't make sense, but nothing
about babyhood does.
Like why I'm fulfilling the cliché,
talking to him, lifting him clumsily
to uncomfortable levels of closeness-
just to see. To listen,
closely-that maybe through the code
of baby-talk there is an answer
to my fears-I'll be able to create
and love one just like you.
I will anxiously expect, through
the chirps and bubbles, vomit.
But it never comes.
And I'm locked in the stare, resting
the little one on my knees-
his body jerks in every direction, but his eyes
stay with mine.
I wonder about his nine-week-old idea
of love-is he telling me that I'm
just a stranger, another outline of a man,
an all purpose filler that could be a father.
Is my love a transient one, like his-conveniently necessary?
And I pass him back, to his parents,
who do understand him,
just in time
for an answer.
Old Stars
By Alix Krzemien '08
One day we will be old.
We will wake up one day
and realize we are so.
We will look at our hands
and try in vain to remember
what they once were like—
not as wrinkled, not so cold.
And when we’re having trouble
getting in and out of cars,
we’ll remember a time
when we sat for hours,
looking at the stars, marveling,
and saying, “They must be old.”
Impossible Anonymous
By Cara Cotter '10
The first rule is “No aliases.” She thinks it strange for a group with the word “anonymous” in its name, but tells the truth anyway.
“Brenna Benson,” she says, waggling her palm in hello.
Around the circle they hum a little after the second B, nodding sagely. With her, they are twelve.
“Hello, Brenna,” they chorus, all except a narrow-chinned man three to her left who dryly echoes her full name, emphasizing the alliteration.
“Do you want to tell us a little about why you joined us?” asks Cindy kindly. She is sitting on Cindy’s sofa and one of Cindy’s Rice Krispie treats is still stuck in the back of her throat, mallow residue and crunchy bits that scrape. If this were the Book Club meeting it feels like, Brenna wouldn’t doubt Cindy would be kindly selecting the bestseller of the month.
They can undoubtedly guess why she’s here. She tries to picture Cindy in the sort of passionate, forever-and-always love with someone so unforgettable, so impossible that she’d land in this group. But she’s too buttoned up for Brenna to imagine it, while the blonde across is too unbuttoned for her to buy as heartbroken. The only one who looks like he’s been in true love is the long-haired guy with the brooding eyes and a common name—Joe? Pete? Paul?
Brenna can’t imagine ever keeping these people straight—there’s even a set of twins, for
Christ’s sake. She doesn’t want to tell these strangers anything.
But she’s here to talk. Leslie thinks it will be good for her. And even Leslie, who’s as good as a sister, was a stranger once.
Brenna picks at her cuticles and forces herself to look up from the pink curves of her nails. Her tongue is dryer than fresh Kleenex but she blurts out the words that don’t half do him justice.
“There was—this guy.”
The dent in his chin looked like a cleft, but he said it was an old cut. “Bike accident,” Ray told Leslie, his eyelashes battering his bangs with each rapid blink. The lying cleft didn’t take away from the honest squareness of his jaw. Brenna knew him for a bad liar, but if he wanted to make his rescue of that kid on the tricycle the SUV hadn’t seen sound like a clumsy spill, she’d happily watch his blue eyes go wide trying.
She loved knowing his secrets.
Secrets are like shorthand in this group; she doesn’t already know them and is left feeling like she’s listening to jargon.
Finn’s new, too, but he’s been there a month longer and confuses her as much, if not more, with every word out of the mouth above his almost triangular chin. Brenna thinks of him as “weasel guy” in her mind until the third month.
The saving grace is that he confuses everyone else just as much.
He steeples his fingers and leans forward into the circle. “I’m not obsessive really,” he says intently. “We…saved the world together.” Brown eyes move searchingly from face to face, and he continues, annoyance seeping in. “I suppose I thought that meant something.”
Brenna’s lip escapes her mouth with a faint pop. Cindy insisted “be nosy” was the unwritten rule. Brenna’s learned they take it seriously. “And when you say saved the world—”
“We saved the world.” Finn’s mobile brows form arched doorways.
Gene adjusts his geek-chic glasses. “Right. We talking, like, Lex Luthor-type voodoo or hug-the-whales shit?”
Finn’s fingers drum against each other. Brenna reckons Leslie would find him cute. Her friend once kept a ferret. Gillian, leaning very precisely forward as she reaches for a frosted brownie, certainly seems to.
“She sealed away the Forces of Darkness.” His hand twitches. “Until at least 2012.”
Gene perks up. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“And you did?” prompts Gene.
Finn is temporarily puzzled, but the realization washes through his eyes and into his straightening shoulders soon enough. “I held her books.”
Gillian straightens up and Gene keeps his voice toneless as he echoes, “You held her
books.”
“Her spellbooks,” says Finn defensively. “It was much—”
“I think we’ll let Paula have her turn,” says Cindy gently, gesturing to a petite girl who wouldn’t look out of place anchoring the five o’clock news.
Walking out that night, Brenna’s not sure she’ll be back. She saw some unusual things dating Ray, but if you stretched science far enough, it was only improbable.
Leslie got her into this. Brenna hopes Les doesn’t think she’s a wacko, finding her these people stranded just south of impossible, and ends up spending most of her night on Wikipedia trying to decide what kind of nuts Finn is.
After that, she starts thinking of him as sort of squirrelly. But she can’t make herself be scared of him, or even laugh at him.
Brenna can never forget she used to believe in impossible things. (Not quite six before breakfast, but three impossible things by suppertime used to be about right.)
At Ray’s shoulder the world seemed smaller and the air so thin that she’d get thirsty. His hand was lightly moist and cold in hers, his lips dewy on her mouth, as if he’d stepped through a vagrant cloud on his way to her.
Naturally she believed him when he said he could fly.
No lies, no exaggerations is the most important rule, but Brenna’s not sure how much it’s followed, with this group. Does it count as truth as long as they believe it?
A work friend of Leslie’s told her about the group, and Brenna’s friend tracked them down and assured her for three months that it was an “honest, warm safe place for people getting over—breakups like yours.”
Brenna caved. Leslie was too gleefully persistent to say no to, which was also how they ended up with the walking fur pillow her friend called a cat, despite all their building’s regulations. Her friend had signed her up before she agreed anyway.
Brenna’s been talking to Valerie in the seat to her left for a few meetings now, and that Finn as well. The corner of her pride that cares was hoping that Peter guy would be trying to chat with her. He sits with the twins Jacob and Jonah each time, on the circle’s fringe, and doesn’t speak.
Pete’s apparently the best-looking guy of the group, though Brenna wouldn’t consider him good-looking beside Ray. Valerie thinks Pete’s incredible. He does have an incredibly straight nose, and green eyes that would probably be piercing if he’d look at you, but Brenna can’t think past the itch to take scissors to his feathery hair. The back sweep towards his shoulders makes her think too much of mullets.
Valerie has a strong, squat face that is more handsome than pretty, and other than her looks and that she usually ends up seated next to her, Brenna doesn’t know much about her yet. Valerie seems good-humored, except when Cindy calls her Val. The sarcasm Valerie reveals every once in a while is a relief here, where everyone seems to believe too earnestly and too much.
Gene is an in-depth exploration of the impact of his isolated childhood on his clinging to his ex-girlfriend, who, Brenna is beginning to suspect, he seems to think is some kind of clone or android meant to love him unconditionally.
“He should just buy a girl for that,” mutters Valerie. “They’ve got ’em in certain stores—in
the ‘inflatables’ aisle.”
Peter has dozed off, reminding Brenna of a bobble-head. Jacob or Jonah nudges him.
“Well, my mother was a blonde,” continues Gene earnestly, “so Loretta, a bru—”
“Does he have a deal?” Brenna whispers, leaning towards Valerie. “Your Pete?” Peter’s not
Valerie’s anything, but she’s got intentions. “Does he ever talk?”
“Oh yeah,” says Valerie. “You know some people think they’re vampires?”
Brenna tries not to recoil, but jumps enough that Cindy notices they aren’t paying attention and firmly—but kindly—suggests they pay attention.
So Brenna only nods a little in answer and spends the rest of the meeting staring at and looking away from Pete, remembering how dangerous the people with capped teeth who drink blood and have creepy fetishes seemed on that episode of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Her gaze flickers to the open curtain and the puddle of sunlight on Pete’s sneakers.
She snags Valerie’s arm at the end, as they trail off the front porch and pretend they’re not mingling. She normally just hurries away to her car, but watching Pete the vampire stroll out under the pinkening sky spikes an extra burst of questions in her.
“Oh, not that kind,” Valerie assures her, pink herself under the early sunset or with the pleasure of sharing inside information. “He says he’s like an energy vampire, draining happiness and fluffy feelings out of the people he’s around. Not a problem to me,” she adds thoughtfully, “so long as he’s around. Oh, and Pete says the girl he’s in love with is a fey, since she’s all bubbly.”
“Fey?”
“That’s like a fairy,” yawns Finn from behind them. Valerie, like Layla with her Twenty Questions from so long ago, wants to know how he knows, but Brenna’s perturbed enough for one night. She hustles off after all, feeling followed by Finn’s parting wink all the way to the curb and her car.
Not even Leslie’s assurances can make her believe everyone in the group is telling the truth after that meeting. She tells her as much, later, when Les is fussing over the interminable
Master’s thesis on her not-so-trusty laptop and Brenna’s sick of flipping through the channels.
“I’m in the wrong group, you know.”
“You’re not,” says Les absently.
“They’re all Looney Tunes. Wait till you hear—”
“Everybody seems crazy once in a while,” says Leslie pointedly, and Brenna clutches the remote almost spastically in response, the buttons rubbery and real beneath her hand.
She doesn’t want to put it down, because then the pressure of the rubber square on her thumb becomes only memory, and memory’s too easy to mix up with dream.
She dreamed about Ray a lot, even when she spent her days with him. Brenna’d always had dreams about flying. When she was seven, they were so vivid she was sure she could soar as a toddler and had only forgotten how.
When she woke up from the dream, the morning after Ray and his windswept hair convinced her, Brenna believed she’d had a very good dream the night before. The draft from the window left the top of her head chilly, a pleasant contrast to the rest of her, cocooned in cotton sheets.
It was only when she got up to close it she found the screen had been popped, and while trying to shove it back into place with tingling fingers, felt the ache in her tendons from her socket through her elbow. As if she’d been wrenched through the air.
In the mirror she found the usual sheen of her hair in knotty elf-locks.
The wind could have knocked the screen. Maybe carrying groceries had left her arms sore. But
Ray winked across the hall and she was sure it was memory, not dream, even before he whispered in her ear that afternoon, wondering if she now had enough proof to believe in impossible.
She wondered if it was like that with Layla, who had Ray as her hero after Brenna’s impossible time was over.
“What was your work friend’s story?” asks Brenna, who’s been hearing lots of stories lately.
Paula in the group had told her all about the epic love she’d had in a magical kingdom accessed by the basement window by her grandmother’s vegetable garden. Valerie, who’s casually mentioned going to Waterloo and Woodstock like she’d been to the dates, not the places, thinks Paula’s spent some time in a place with rubber walls. “It was Gina, right, not Crazy Sally?”
“Mm-hmm, Gina.” Les’ words are garbled by the pencil in her mouth. “Dunno. She’s not crazy, though.”
“Would it be okay if I call her? I want to know what she—what?”
Leslie’s eyes have left the screen with such sudden horror Brenna thinks that she’s gone and crashed her laptop for the seventh time.
“Les? What’s the matter?”
Brenna can hear the lip-parting smack of her friend’s hesitation as the teeth-marked pencil tumbles against the laptop. Brenna can feel her own face fall into a frown and reaches for the mute button. The clip of the newscaster’s voice over the silence is giving her a sick feeling in her stomach.
“I lied,” blurts Leslie, eyes kittenish as she bites her lower lip in distress. Only her two front teeth show and she looks like a girl’s doll. “I was afraid you wouldn’t—if I told you who—don’t be mad at me, Bren, I—”
“Spit it out!”
“It was Layla’s group.”
The roof of her mouth is suddenly sour. “Your cousin Layla?” she says, even though they don’t know another Layla.
The group seems suddenly, frighteningly more real because Layla’s not a dreamer, and, unfortunately, no dream.
If she has a secret still kept from the group, it’s Layla. It’s not that her love couldn’t last because of the impossible. It didn’t last real life—it didn’t last Layla—and that is what Brenna’d really rather not talk about.
She tried to hate Layla Lance. It should have been easy. Layla’s a redhead by request and too beautiful by nature, like some successful nightmare amalgamation of models and movie stars, Claudia Schiffer’s legs and Vivien Leigh’s eyes. Her name has a song.
Layla took ten minutes parallel parking in front of her cousin Leslie’s house. Brenna’d never seen anyone do a worse job at something so simple.
Layla Lance worked at the radio station and, at Leslie’s request, had pulled strings there to get
Ray his job. He liked working with her enough to talk about her, or at least her fixer-up car—a red Camaro that had come out of the seventies worse for the wear that Layla spent her spare hours on. Brenna couldn’t tell a Camaro from a Cadillac, but it was a carefully clean car, if less than shiny.
They were waiting for it to backfire, but it didn’t, and Layla bounded out triumphantly, shutting the car door with enthusiasm and sliding through the careful space between her car and Mr. Beamer’s. “Sorry I’m late!”
She was older than them and looked it, hair sleek, pantsuit professional. She wore three-inch heels—which caught on the curb and sent her, arms pin-wheeling, back against Mr. Beamer’s car with a thump.
The car alarm went off, starting its first range of climbing notes, and Layla dissolved instantly into a full-throated guffaw. Even her snorts were attractive. Brenna could feel Ray’s pulse skip notes, even though his hand was warmly in hers.
“Glad you’re okay,” he said sincerely when she bounded up to them. He was glad, and grinning a little.
Layla had an exaggerated version of her cousin Leslie’s mouth, and Brenna’s best friend’s friendly, expansive mouth looked too wide on Layla’s otherwise classic face. She smiled with it, showcasing perfect, straight but quite broad teeth, and Brenna couldn’t help but smile back.
“So, you’re Ray’s girl,” Layla said conspiratorially when they finally managed introductions. Her voice was surprisingly low and resonated with delight. “You must just want to kill me.”
Brenna was taken aback. She did, of course—she was catching the dance in Ray’s eyes as Layla approached, heard how fast his measured words were talking to or about this girl.
“Is he still bruised? If my guy nearly got himself killed as much as—” She tilted her head at
Brenna’s confused face and Ray’s warming one. “You stinker—you didn’t tell her you saved my life?”
“Saved your life?” repeated Leslie incredulously, and Ray blanched. Brenna, instinctively, opened her mouth to come up with a story like always, then realized Ray wasn’t looking helplessly at her, but at Layla.
They couldn’t get the story quite straight between them, though they settled on “a-panel-antenna-nearly-fell-on-her” eventually. Layla made it sound convincing, and distractingly focused the whole story on her own clumsiness. “You should make use of those bragging rights, hero,” she said, and punched his arm. “Even for just saving a silly girl like me.”
Ray mumbled when Brenna tried to get out of him what had really happened. “Just that,” he said with a shrug. “It was silly.” He started throwing “just” into sentences a lot without realizing it.
It rubbed off of Layla.
After that, she had another reason to hate her—curious, interesting, persistent Layla slowly but surely knew more about Ray than she did.
Layla had a fiancé. She was older. She was nice. She was safe.
Brenna knew long before they did that Ray was going to be in love with Layla once he realized
he was no longer in love with her. But for a while, habit had him convinced he still loved her. And she loved him too much to let him go until he left by himself.
She knew she’d just been written out of what she’d thought was her own love story.
She finds out from Cindy that the rules were Layla’s rules first. Cindy was the only one of the current group there when Layla was running the group, a couple years back now.
Brenna doesn’t know where Layla is now. Leslie would tell her, if she asks. Last time she did it was Chicago. She’d moved up to the news. She could still be there.
She wants to break the rules after that, and starts thinking about that.
“Don’t get entangled with group members,” Cindy suggested when she first met with her, about joining.
No one follows that one.
It’s the easiest one to break, so she actually feels good about saying yes when Finn, with his dark-not-blue eyes, asks her to coffee.
Her last date was a blind one, with a blue-eyed boy whose name she can’t recall. It was after Ray died, but she didn’t know that till the next afternoon. She found out Ray was dead three days after it was done. Two years after they were done, after Layla stopped wearing a ring and he said to Brenna he was sorry, so sorry, but he had to take the chance, however Layla felt about him.
Brenna was in the cosmetics aisle at CVS, and Leslie was grabbing cheap chips for their place.
Les’ phone beeped out a Five for Fighting ringtone and she mouthed it was her Aunt Carol.
Brenna remembers the specks on the tile squares beneath her then, the gum wrappers and hair strands, but she doesn’t remember what Leslie said next.
Sometimes she traces her palm where the imprint of the metal rack she gripped stayed for
hours.
When she thinks of Ray, the floor still spins.
Sometimes she hopes Layla was with him.
Sometimes she hopes she wasn’t.
She goes with Finn after the group session in mid-March. He pays for her grande butter
caramel cappuccino.
She’s surprised that he doesn’t mention his girl who saved the world—only once, when he mentions the girl’s eyes were almost purple. Finn doesn’t know anyone in the group any better than she does, so they talk about what they’ve learned or guessed. She acts like she doesn’t believe any of it—breaking another rule. He acts like he believes it all, but his sincerity seems mock when his eyes flash occasionally.
From what Valerie says, she was in love with a time traveler who had a girl in every century and a guy in a few. She thought he only took her to the end of the universe, that it was their moment. It turned out to be a pretty crowded one.
The twins Jacob and Jonah loved the same girl, some kind of miracle healer, but agreed to both give her up. She couldn’t decide. They wouldn’t compete.
Gillian’s psychic fiancé dumped her for the sake of both their futures. Her next boyfriend,
a musician, thought the devil owned his soul. Gill’s sort of seeing Pete now. Brenna doesn’t think it’s much of an improvement.
Finn is convinced balding Frank’s an alien.
“A legal one?” Brenna asks, and he laughs.
His laugh’s nice, even if he is nuts.
Cindy, he tells her, had a daughter who died. That’s all he knows.
Ray was the first person she really knew who died. And she’d known him almost best. Their whole high school class went to his funeral, in summer’s green grass when practically everyone was home. High school had only seen them together. Former cross-country runners, junior prom queens, yearbook staff and fallen away friends alike all stepped up to console her. They went to shake her hand at the funeral home, and she had to shake her head instead.
“I wasn’t, anymore,” she choked, again and again, and would point them vaguely towards Ray’s adoptive parents, who looked aged twenty years in the eyes, or leave Leslie to explain.
Layla sat like a very shocked ice sculpture and did not cry.
Brenna wondered if Layla Lance could have loved him any more than she did.
If she ever hated her, it was then.
But she hated herself more, for envying Layla, even at that moment, at that place.
When she calls Layla, she has her fingers resting on the fridge door, tapping the photo magnet from senior prom. Ray is glancing out of the frame, to where, she remembers, the plaster castle façade was about to fall on Tim Leary and Rita Corleone.
His arm is already off her waist, in blurred movement.
Ray got there before they got hurt, of course.
The theme was “A Knight to Remember.” Her dress was pink. It still fit when she went to dances at his college, but this was the last dance he loved her for.
She got Layla’s number from Cindy, not Leslie. She couldn’t face Leslie’s inescapable glee at her agreeing to talk to her cousin, like Les had been pushing for years now.
The redhead—if she is still one—picks up on the seventh ring.
“Hello?” Her voice is raspier than Brenna remembers.
“Layla—hi, this is Brenna Benson.”
“Brenna.” There’s a pause. “Do you need something?”
She decides to skip pleasantries too. “I joined this group. I’ve heard you started it.”
“Oh. Yes. For impossible cases.” Her laugh is the same, a gentle ripple too cheery to be mocking. Gratifyingly Brenna finds she can hate her a little—but not much, because Ray loved her. For as long as his forever lasted. “You’re moving on?”
“Did you?” Brenna asks sharply, unable to breathe. She’s not sure what answer she’s hoping for.
“No,” says Layla, like the question was funny. She breathes fast on the other end. “That’s why I had to leave—it was sort of, mm, kind of counterproductive, for me to be running it. But it was working, it was actually working for my friends and well—” She laughs again, self deprecatingly, the way Brenna remembers her best. Layla has always pulled off the impossible mix of seeming self-assurance and lack of vanity. She always seemed just good enough for Ray.
“I don’t want to get over him.”
Brenna’s lungs fill again, and she wants to scream “Me too! I don’t want to!” But somehow that seems like this girl’s right, even if isn’t, because her true love was lasting until he was lost. Brenna had Ray longer, but not last, and according to Leslie, they were just so young. And she’ll get over it.
It isn’t really fair. She presses her back against the freezer door, cold running up her backbone.
Her heels dig into the wood floor, to be sure this is real, not the dreaminess of a black dress and dirt on a closed box. “He’s—not coming back?” She sounds like a child.
“It doesn’t actually work like that,” says Layla. “You were there. We buried him.”
“But—” They said it was a fight—a joke one, with a work friend, gone wrong. An unlucky punch to the spleen. Brenna couldn’t bring herself to ask, beg, Layla for the details, then or now. She didn’t know what really happened, but it couldn’t have been that. “It was him. He was always—” Doing impossible things, she thinks, but doesn’t finish the sentence.
“Impossible isn’t always enough,” says Layla, and her rasp is croaked. “Brenna, I watched him die.” Her voice cracks jaggedly. “I’m sorry—look, I have to go. If you need to—I—can call you back.”
“It’s okay,” she says, in a soothing, even tone, even though it isn’t okay yet. She hangs up.
After a while she takes the prom magnet off the fridge, like Leslie’s been asking.
She doesn’t cry. She swallows her heartburn and opens the fridge to get the brown sugar, because it’s her turn to bring dessert.
The point of the rules is to set the past free. Not to let it rule you.
She’s following most of them.
She tells Finn about Layla when they break the rules again, for lunch. He breaks into song. “You got me on my knees, Laaaay—” She cuts him off there. He’s no Eric Clapton and jeez, they’re out in public. With Ray, they never tried to draw attention, only divert it.
“I miss the magic more than her,” Finn tells her later, about the girl in his memories. “’S why
I can’t move on. Why I’m here. Her life’s the same without me. Mine’s dull as grass. No more
walking on the moon,” he sighs, and she thinks he’s being figurative.
She thinks.
When Ray kissed her mouth and promised her the moon, she could taste it, though this once he meant it metaphorically.
Blue cheese, she decided, and told him as much.
Ray laughed, which always made her stomach rollercoaster, and when his hand grazed hers
as he reached for another slice of pizza it looped upside down. “Nah,” he said, “not good enough. Your moon’ll be made of meringue. What, can’t you see it? S’all white, with peaks and dips, light as air—”
“Does it have chocolate chips?”
“Of course,” he said, gesturing with the folded-up slice. “Meteors,” he smiled, and she couldn’t imagine flying could be any better than this.
Breaking just the one rule is getting to be a habit.
She gets the butter rum cappuccino next time.
“What happened to Pete?” Brenna wonders as they sit down, straight after the meeting at Cindy’s.
“Heard he’s dating a chick who thinks she’s a werewolf. Doesn’t need us anymore.” Finn grins. One of his teeth is slightly snaggled. His chin’s too narrow. His eyes aren’t blue.
“My roommate Leslie’s started dating Chester James,” Brenna throws in, naming the best known man in the city.
“The billionaire?!”
“Only a multimillionaire, actually.”
“I’ve heard interesting things about what he gets up to at night.” His eyebrows arch.
She’s not flying but somehow she likes him. There are sparks. She smiles.
In a while, she thinks, she’ll ask him about magic.