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In Medias Res

 

“I can’t believe there’s four years of Latin textbooks on the shelves,” she says.

            “And you shouldn’t,” I say. “Because there are way more than four years.”

            “I thought you did four years with Mrs. Johnson in high school,” she says.

            “I did. And then another three years with Professors Donovan and Ray in college.” 

            After selling the television, the faded armchair, and the clothes I shudder to see, let alone put near my body, I was able to move the shelves my old roommate abandoned into the apartment living room. I thought about the best way to arrange the hundreds of books I would put onto these shelves. These were anything from texts I’d gotten in middle school to recent releases I’d bought the previous month. They spanned genres, and more importantly, dimensions and colors whose contrast could overpower the eye, the mind, the aesthetic appreciation of the arrangement.

            I stroll to the shelf on the far left, where she stands. I stretch my hand to point at a series of glossy, hardcover texts when I realize I can’t contort far enough over her body. With a series of exaggerated moans and wails, I shove my body against hers. She mewls and whines, more feline than human, as she stomps to the side. 

            She pouts. She looks pretty when she does this: I’ve told her to do it in pictures. Then she bends over, boobs thrust forward, ass thrust backward. She looks pretty when she does this too, though I wouldn’t tell her that. I turn back to the books before me so that my eyes don’t linger.

            Although she’s reading the names on the spines, she’s also attending to me, because when I now reach toward a book, she flicks my right shoulder with her finger. I do the same to her left shoulder. She tugs at the hem of my dress; I do the same to hers. She recoils.

            “Hey now,” she says. “I didn’t get mine at H+M, like yours. I actually spent serious money on this one. Don’t go all Mr. Powell’s tenth grade biology class on me.”

            “You totally started it that day.”

            “I did not,” she says. “Because you definitely didn’t wear any dresses back then. Let alone fancy ones.”

            “But you were giving me shit for reading Latin in my free time. Which, incidentally, I still do.” Finally she turns to the book I’ve indicated. “Grad student friend didn’t want her workbooks on Catullus.”

            “And here I thought you spent all these years after high school getting away from what made you miserable. Should’ve considered dumping the declension charts.”

            “I should’ve considered starting this process before high school.”

            She strolls away from the foreign language shelf and onto the one for classical literature. She doesn’t get past the A section of last names before stopping.

            “This is new, though.” 

            “I had Mrs. Johnson for four years, after all,” I say. 

            She rolls her eyes. “And she was a caring mentor, who taught you about both Latin and life, and who listened to your problems whenever you both had free lunch periods.” She did, of course. She listened when I raved about some literary classic I’d just finished for the first time. She listened when I cried about my parents banning makeup. She listened when I swore about how I couldn’t share my feelings with the girl I fancied.

            “She also inspired me to broaden my horizons. Her giving me Murakami when I graduated is why I started reading the surrealists.”

            “The surrealists and Jane Austen?”

            “Bitch did love her some Jane Austen. And now so do I.”

            “You’re telling me,” she says. “Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. Wow. Many of her fans can’t even name those. I know you like cutesy shit, but this is excessive even for you.”

            “It’s not like this happened two weeks ago. It interested me back in high school, before I was okay with myself. But then again, imagine that version of me liking cutesy shit.”

            “Yeah,” she says, “people would’ve been shitty to you for liking that. Except for me.”

            “You’d be shitty to me for saying your dad’s taste in music was better than yours, right?” 

            She turns to me, makes an obscene gesture, and smiles. If I weren’t an unnaturally tall, unnaturally broad colossus, onlookers might’ve mistaken us for sisters. We share the dramatic facial expressions, the rich amber eyes, the comfortable combat that both of us knows the other can endure. Nonetheless, I try to think of us as sisters so I don’t think of us any other way. 

            She pauses, taps her foot, scratches her head. Some memory has wrenched her away from the next part of the bookshelf.

            “Jokes aside,” she says, “I’m still really glad you trusted me with that. Especially when I was the only one at the time.”

            “Shit,” I say, “you were the only one for a year.” 

            Nodding at my contentment, at my thanks, and at my lack of offense, she smiles. “Good,” she says, “my opinions are insightful enough you need to think about them for a year before chatting up the riffraff.”

            Now freed from this recollection, this concern, this sentiment, she pulls Persuasion from the shelf, looks through it, sees the pencil marking that the used book store put into the edition I purchased. 

            “Trust me,” I say, “it’s good.”

            “Captain of the cheerleading team good?”

            “She wasn’t that pretty.”

            “Then why’d you ask her to prom?” 

            I make the obscene gesture this time.

            “Because I was too scared to ask you. Was that what you wanted to hear?”

            “I mean, I wanted to hear that I was prettier than her. But she got super fat, so I guess I won that.” 

            She looks from the shelf, to me, to the book she’s extracted. It looks like evidence in a trial now, something a prosecutor has put before me, whose existence I must explain to avoid a conviction. “I guess I’ll read this. You were close enough.” 

            Rather than stay steady, her tone rises at the end, making this statement interrogative even without the question mark. She’s not asking me to confirm whether she’s read it, she’s asking me the question her statement implies. All the while, she leaves the text bent on the shelf, mostly freed from the aperture that its removal has created as if waiting for orders on what she should do with it.

            “You can borrow it,” I say. “Read it, and see for yourself. You don’t have to take my word for it.”

            “Are you sure?” she says. This time her question has the appropriate structure, bluntness, punctuation. “You go through years of trouble to get these books, and then more trouble to make your living room into this library that’s all neatly organized. I wouldn’t want to disrupt it.”

            Her heart-shaped face is serious now, as if this offense were graver than it was. She’s looked at me this way every breakup I described to her, every girl I dated but didn’t desire, every girl except the one I couldn’t find the courage to ask. 

            “Why do you think you were the first one I showed it to? I hoped you’d disrupt it.”

            “Really?”

            “I mean, I don’t want you to knock the shelves over, or throw all my mystery novels out the window. But I’m not going to refuse to lend you a book now that I’ve arranged it nicely.” 

            She looks at me with her eyes narrowed and head tilted. It’s the expression she’s given whenever I talked about my loathing and despair but before I could identify its cause, before I had the words to describe its cause.

            I need to explain more of my rationale before she thinks it disingenuous. “Books can say a lot about what people like and believe, even if they don’t know it. You would never have gotten near cyberpunk unless I’d bought you Snow Crash.”

            “Hacker swordsmen and girls on high-tech skateboards are an easier sell than Jane fucking Austen.”

            “And once you’ve read Persuasion and taken back all the things you said about Jane fucking Austen, you’ll agree with me that books are meant to be shared. They’re meant to be given.”

            Her sigh is as pronounced and protracted as when I’d mention my parents using words like “lifestyle”, “confusion”, and “choice” when describing what I did with my own body.

            “You’re going to talk about your Latin teacher again, aren’t you? How Johnson got you Murakami, and you’d never heard of Murakami, and that’s why you read all these incomprehensible books about disaffected Japanese men.”

            “For my graduation, I got some clothes I never wore, some money I blew on concerts for hacks I thought were good back then, and an e-reader, which clearly isn’t the way I enjoy reading books. But the only gift I kept, aside from the signed version of The Night Circus you got me that’s on one of these shelves, was the copy of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that she got me.

            “She wrote this wonderful note on one of the cover pages, talking about how she loved having me as a student. It was the only message I got that wasn’t perfunctory, even the ones on cards that friends and family gave to me.”

            “So that’s why you wrote the note on the cover page of American Gods when you gave it to me.”

            “And Lolita.” 

            She tilts her head to the other side. This time, both eyes and mouth are open: her expression when I told her who I really was, revealed to her everything I had kept secret, illuminated a dark patch between us that looked irrevocably different. 

            “Shit, really?” she says. “I thought you just got that for me because I lost my copy.” She flares her nostrils and clenches her fists, seething at the recalled memory she will now describe.

            “I’d told that fucker I was dating that I lost it, and that it was my favorite book, and that I wanted a copy, and instead for Christmas he gets me The Alchemist.” She pulls her fists toward her body while stewing about her least favorite book and ex-boyfriend. 

            “So thank you,” she says, “for getting me an amazing gift, and then writing your own wonderful note on top of it.”

            “Calling it ‘wonderful’ would be too kind. But you should read it. And then you should read Persuasion.” 

            She sighs. “Fine. I’ll take it.” She removes it, places it beneath one of her arms, and moves from the classics section to the science fiction one. I pause when she does. “This is almost like penance. Everything by Jane Austen, but nothing from that violent space marine series you raved about. The one where every man’s rifle and every woman’s breasts got a paragraph of description.” 

            I shake my head. “People have lots of delusions when they’re in high school,” I say. She nods to acknowledge the breadth of delusions to which I refer. 

            “Part of that delusion was thinking that stuff like weddings, social engagements, all that shit in Jane Austen novels, were frivolous. I didn’t think there was any literature worth reading that didn’t have plasma cannons and women in jumpsuits. If I didn’t get that copy of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I’d probably only have trite macho shit on these shelves.”

            “Well, that explains why you’ve got this feminist sci-fi canon here. The Parable of the Sower, The Left Hand of Darkness–you’re failing at being a good postcolonial reader, though, because I’m not seeing The Fifth Season anywhere.”

            “You still have my copy.”

            “Allegedly.” The quick laugh that rises plummets into the silence. She tilts her head so that she doesn’t avoid me but refuses to make eye contact. This reaction I could never forget. I saw it when I explained my feelings for her, when I had the confidence to voice them, and when it was too late to do so.

            “But more importantly,” she says, “where did you put all those space marine books? Under your mattress?”

            “I burned them.”

            “Are you serious?”

            “No. But I gave them all to my cousin.”

            “I thought they didn’t talk to you anymore?”

            “None of the first cousins do. But one of my second cousins escaped their Florida conservatism after he ran the gamut of the queer community. Fell in love with a girl who was trans, then a girl who was bi, then–”

            “Let me guess,” she interrupts, “a girl who was gay.”

            “No,” I say, “a guy who was.” 

            She shakes her head, chuckles, turns back to the shelf.

            She fingers two thick volumes near the bottom of the shelf whose covers are worn enough they look perforated. These versions are next to replicas without the damage, pristine and immaculate, their pages unbent and unsullied because fingers have not yet opened them. I’ve considered sleeves for them, the kind I’ve wrapped around the Ms. Marvel and Spider-Gwen first editions she got me, if only there were sleeves that were large enough.

            “Oh god, Book of the New Sun?” she says, pointing at both the damaged and the clean copies. “That’s that tedium with all the obscure words and Latin terms. I’m sure that’s why you and your favorite professor both love it, but has anybody else in the world ever read it?”

            “I’ve heard it called the sci-fi Ulysses,” I say, “in that more people have it on their bookshelf than have read it.”

            “Is it even really sci-fi, though? I remember reading it, and it was all feudal. They have like guilds and shit. Swords and duels and horse travel. No blaster pistols.”

            “You didn’t get far enough into the story.” 

            “I couldn’t, not with that narrator. Look, I’m sorry if I’m a boring straight girl, but I don’t need to hear about a woman’s breasts every other page.”

            “I always interpreted that as the narrator being so warped that boobs were the primary way he could perceive other women. But I suppose you are right.”

            “Really?”

            “About you being boring at least.” 

            She makes a different obscene gesture this time.

            “All right, joking aside, I will go to bat for the series. But this one is actually really good. Once you get far enough, you realize it’s not the kind of story you think. The truth isn’t what you expect, but it makes sense once you learn it.” 

            Now she has the simpler smirk, the easier display of cheekiness. “I can understand why you like that kind of story.” 

            She continues to smirk as I roll my eyes. I put both of the books atop the copy of Persuasion she’s taken. She rises from the ground, turns her eyes, looks at the other shelves.

            She pushes her body to one side as she sashays past me. To counterbalance her antics, I shove in the opposite direction. We teeter a bit before she laughs, cheekily and quickly, and then crosses the room to where I’ve stored the modern fiction.

            I shouldn’t stare at her from behind, but my eyes linger for a moment. Although my mind knows that we cannot work out, a different organ, an unfortunate vestige I haven’t been able to remove, remembers about when we could have.

            That body I thought magnificent most of my classmates found adequate, attractive even, but not stunning. Hers was the figure I wanted but could never attain, much as I tried, much as I begged my female friends to experiment with my hair, makeup, and general style. Even now I’m not much like her. I’m too tall. My figure will always be too straight to have her expansive ass; my body will either be too pudgy, as then, or too toned, as it is now, to have her lithe softness. Though not large enough to turn heads at bars, her boobs are bigger than the ones I’ve managed to grow, which are small enough to elicit pity. 

            In contrast, hers was the most feminine figure I could imagine–in an archetypal and archaic sense of the word, more about petticoats than pink pastels. Her makeup was subtle and understated rather than extravagant and exaggerated. Pale and brunette, thin but not particularly toned, she looked more appropriate for a nineteenth century painting than a high school. I knew her form was slender, her hips wide, her breasts heavy, from the boudoir photos she’d gotten done and showed me. Hers were the wet lips I imagined kissing on late nights when we’d gotten close to each other while we chatted, teased, drank. 

            She ends this reverie with a question.

            “A Clockwork Orange is good, too, right?”

            I nod. She stares at it, expectant but hesitant, like a woman assessing whether the gift her husband gave her at a birthday party is too salacious for her to unwrap in public. I remove it from the shelf.

            “Another Johnson recommendation?”            

            “She thought it was excessive. We argued for a whole lunch period. She made some great points. It is, in fact, a pretty grim book that almost tries to be difficult to read. That’s why I don’t usually recommend it. That, and because too many people like it for creepy reasons. But I really like it, for whatever that’s worth.”

            “I’ll take it then.” 

            I reach forward, extract the sable slip, and deposit it on top of the three books she already has. As if to justify its addition, its physical presence before her, she says: 

            “I wouldn’t have thought you were creepy. Then again, I didn’t realize you were into me, so perhaps I’m not the best judge.”

            “Considering I didn’t realize you were into me, I wasn’t any better.”

            After craning her arm up and to the side to examine my copy of White Noise, she wobbles backward with the stack of books. I put my arm around her back to steady her. She puts the books on my couch.

            “Do you ever think about what would have happened,” I say, “if we had?”

            “I mean, I told you about the sex dreams about you. You back then, of course.”

            “Yeah,” I say, “that’s not how the sex would go now.”

            “Right,” she says. It’s an assessment and an admission, a partial answer, even if indirectly, to the previous question. It’s a fragment she doesn’t complete, a note she abandons after one paragraph. 

            As if taking all the focus of her conscious mind, her fingers drift in silence over to the Atwood collection. Her fingers stop on Oryx and Crake. We’ve debated whether it’s science fiction, and could renew that debate, but neither of us speaks. Neither of us can speak. She pulls out Cat’s Eye, stares at the cover, holds it over the books she’s stacked on the couch. 

            Unable to contemplate a segue, let alone an apropos response, I dash into the kitchen to retrieve a plastic container she can use to ferry her loot back home. When I bring it to her, I consider getting a second one, because she’s added The Blind Assassin, The Robber Bride, and Alias Grace to the pile. 

            She’s squatting in the corner, near the bottom shelf, looking at the row of books by Murakami. She tells me she read 1Q84 over the course of months. Liking it, but wanting something shorter, she grabs Kakfa on the Shore and throws it on the pile. She does the same with Norwegian Wood. Then she pulls my weather-beaten and dog-eared copy of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle from the shelf.

            “No,” I say. She shivers at my sudden loudness, forcefulness, restriction. “I mean, it’s a great book. But I can’t give you my copy.” 

            As if suspecting blood from a cultic ritual inside it, she begins to open it. “No,” I say again.

            “Okay, I get this might have sentimental value, but are you really not going to let me open it?” When I strain my hand toward it, she places it on the nearest shelf, leaning it against works by both Tana French and Gillian Flynn.

            “That was the one Mrs. Johnson gave to me,” I say. I see her questions I haven’t answered, the secrets she knows are buried but has yet to deracinate. “It was the one with the message about the years of Latin I took with her. How I was one of her favorite students that year, and that she’d miss having me the next year. Because I’d just graduated high school.” 

            Her face tilts far enough to the side that I fear her headband will fall to the floor.

            “I bet it’s very touching,” she says, “very personal, all that. But is this any more personal than the shit we told each other? The shit we were just talking about?”

            “It’s painful,” I say.

            “You don’t think it’s fucking painful for me to talk about that memory?”

            Shivering with anger, I open the page. With a single finger, I point to that first word, that solitary salutation, that painful memento. 

            “She addressed it to me. Before she knew who I really was.” 

            Her eyes, then her brow, then all the lines on her face retract. Then she marches into my kitchen. She extracts from my junk drawer a thick, black Sharpie. I let her open to the page bearing the secret that remains written there, the word she already knows but I wish she didn’t. She scribbles over not only the name but also the space to the left and right, blotting even the length. Someone would guess a longer name, or stranger name, a name not so painfully familiar to me. 

            It hurts me until I feel her embrace. It’s soothing rather than perfunctory: not the kind we give when greeting each other, but the kind she gave me when my last boyfriend dumped me, the kind I gave her when her grandfather passed away. 

            She presents the page to me. She’s written my current, legal, feminine name, the talisman against all creeping dysphoria. 

            “That’s what would’ve happened if we’d gotten together,” she says. “Because that’s who you are.”

            I speak through tears.

            “That’s a wonderful note.”

 

Stephanie Marklives in Denver, Colorado. Her work has been published in The Festival Reviewand will be published in Progenitor Art & Literary Journal,and a Thorntree Press anthology. She was also shortlisted for the Into the Void 2018 Fiction Prize. She hosts various creative projects at www.patreon.com/junesayers.