Astonish Me. Maggie Shipstead

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СКАЧАТЬ realized, with a flush of gratitude, that her standards for wisdom were pathetically low. He patted her shoulder. “I won’t.”

      He liked her delicate, feline face, her long, wispy hair, her narrow hips, her duck-footed walk, the gap between the tops of her thighs when she was in tights, her small, bony hands. If his sister Marion would drive him and not tell their mother, he went to Joan’s recitals, and he liked the way she was willing to stand onstage and be looked at. Eventually, March of sophomore year, when he finally actually turned fourteen, he confessed his age, and by then they were too close for her to make much of a fuss, although he thought he detected a new and faintly patronizing undertone in the way she spoke to him, especially about her dates, which were as frequent as her ballet schedule would allow and, he gathered, relatively chaste. She seemed more interested in the public victory of securing the attention of popular and athletic boys than the private encounters that might follow.

      “I can tell you anything,” she told Jacob often, which, to him, sounded less like a compliment than a command, the way his father said, You’ll make this family proud. Her confessional openness struck him, sometimes, less as a sign of intimacy between them than a smoke screen meant to keep him at a distance. She would chatter on, telling him how Barry Sauerland had offended her at the winter formal by implying that she was not his first-choice date or how Floyd Bishop had called her an icicle. She never seemed to notice that Jacob did not reciprocate her confidences, or not exactly. He confided in her about his father’s distant rigidity and his mother’s suffocating rigidity and about their clockwork marriage that, on rare occasions of malfunction, caused both to go wild with rage. But he did not talk to Joan about girls, even though he took dates to dances and sometimes to the movies, disguising his lack of a driver’s license as a lack of a car.

      Just before graduation, Joan tore a ligament in her foot. She had been slated to dance in a student performance in New York, where she would be seen by the directors of companies there and from San Francisco and Chicago and everywhere, she said, but now she could only lie around her house with her foot in a cast, paralyzed with fear that she would not heal, that she would miss her chance.

      “Let’s go to the beach,” Jacob said on a hot Saturday. Joan was lying on the couch with her cast propped up on a pillow, and he was sitting on the floor beside her, absently digging his fingers into the jungley olive-green pile of the carpet while they watched American Bandstand. “This is getting depressing.”

      Track was over; he was officially going to Georgetown, was officially the valedictorian, could relax for the first time in his life, and his big reward was to be pressed into constant service as Joan’s footman in her mother’s austere, gloomy den. At first, he had been eager to spend long, unsupervised hours indoors with Joan, but she was so morose that it seemed inappropriate to persist in the hope that they would finally make out, if only to dispel the boredom. Instead he made sandwiches for her that she didn’t eat, poured Tab over ice, changed the channel at her bidding, and waited for the unseen filaments of her ligament to knit themselves back together. Even Joan’s mother, off for the weekend with one of Rick’s successors, was having more fun.

      “I can’t go to the beach,” she snapped, pointing at her cast. “Remember?”

      “You don’t have to go in the water. Let’s just get out of here. My mom will let me take the car. She’s so happy I’m leaving soon.”

      “I’ll get sand in my cast.”

      “We’ll put a bag over it.” An idea struck him. “I’ll carry you.”

      She looked skeptical.

      “I’ll put you down on a towel, and you can just lie there. It’ll be almost as good as lying on the couch all day. You’ll love it.”

      “You’re not that strong.”

      “You don’t weigh anything.” He was not entirely certain he could carry her all the way from the car to the beach, but he was willing to try. Her injury made her more approachable, somehow. Not that he was afraid of her. He was just aware of her boundaries, of the prickly force field around her. Standing over her, though, while she lay hobbled and clutching her plastic cup of soda, he decided to be daring. “Stand up,” he said.

      His authoritative tone seemed to surprise her. She set her drink on the carpet, swung her legs around, and, taking his outstretched hands, stood unevenly on her bare foot and her cast. He put one arm under her knees and one around her back, and then he straightened up, cradling her. The easy way she lay in his arms reminded him that she was no stranger to being carried. Jacob had met her pas de deux partner, the only boy at her studio, Gregory, son of Russian immigrant scientists, a sallow, pimply creature who was educated by private tutors to avoid the brutalizing influence of high school. Gregory, for all his apparent wimpiness, could lift Joan over his head with ease. Jacob had wondered what it would be like to lift her, to grasp her by her thighs or her waist and move her body through space as he pleased. She looked at him. Their faces were very close. “Okay, fine,” she said. “Let’s go to the beach.”

      Jacob’s mother handed over the keys to her Rambler wagon with minimal admonitions. The front seat stretched out long between him and Joan, its scratchy cream upholstery radiating early summer warmth. Joan sprawled in the sun: wiry legs poking out of short shorts, bikini ties in a tantalizing bow at her nape, her face turned to her open window. The Rambler, with its big windows and long bench seats and vast carpeted launchpad of a cargo space in back, did not seem, as it usually did, like a blocky symbol of maternity but was transformed into a terrarium of sexual possibility. For weeks, Jacob had been gearing up to try something with Joan. Not because he didn’t care about their friendship but because he felt like his participation in that friendship, as it was, had become disingenuous. He wasn’t a saint or a child. He wasn’t the palace eunuch. He wasn’t her cousin, as he knew she had told one of her boyfriends. She might reject him—probably would reject him—but he needed to come clean. High school was, for all intents and purposes, over, and he needed to slough off its context. He wasn’t eager to be separated from Joan, but he was curious what would be in store for him at Georgetown, who he would be there.

      They turned off the main road and bounced along a sandy lane to their usual spot, some way down the shore from the popular swimming beach. Before they’d left, Joan had rallied enough to stump around the kitchen filling a thermos with fruit punch and her mother’s vodka, and after he parked, Jacob took the towels and the ice chest and crossed the low, sharp-grassed dunes. He spread the towels out on dry sand, and then he went back to get Joan. She was standing on her good foot, leaning against the Rambler.

      “I think it would make the most sense for me to ride piggyback,” she announced when he drew near. “For long-distance transport.”

      He considered. He had already held her in his arms, and having her cling to his back sounded like a new and interesting variation. “Okay,” he said. “You’re the boss.” He turned around and crouched down. Nimbly for someone in a cast, she hopped aboard. As he started across the sand, he kept his eyes on the terrain in front of him, but his nerves were busily mapping her body. His hands were wrapped around the backs of her thighs. He could feel her ropy muscles under his fingers and a film of sweat. The rough plaster of her cast occasionally scraped the outside of his left calf. Her arms were around his neck, her sharp chin on his shoulder, the soft points of her small breasts against his back. The spot where the crotch of her shorts pressed against his waist was almost too potent to think about. His glasses slid down his nose, and he kept having to toss his head like a horse to keep them from sliding off. They didn’t speak until he stooped to let her dismount onto the blue-and-white-striped towel.

      “Such service,” she said, sitting and smiling up at him uncertainly. She felt the pull, too. He knew she СКАЧАТЬ