Unbecoming: A Novel Read online

  Her date would ask why he had called her Grace. And hadn’t she said she was from California? And Len Schrader might tell his daughter he’d seen Grace in France, and Kendall might wonder, again, what had become of Grace, and that boyfriend of hers. . . .

  And on, and on.

  So Grace had smiled at her date and suggested that maybe they weren’t that hungry after all, maybe they should go, and then she sneaked out the side door like a psychopath or a sure thing, depending on his expectations. He followed her out and she went home with him. How strange it was to feel safe only with strangers! She had sex with the bartender, trying to fully participate in this made-up life she was so determined to have, and shared a cigarette in his kitchen under a yellow light. Grace didn’t smoke, but Julie did.

  Two weeks later, the bartender showed up near the Clignancourt metro. Grace was on her way home, and she saw him there on the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette and talking on his cell phone. She hadn’t given her number. She had slipped out of his apartment while he slept.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

  He’d laughed, a little meanly. “My sister lives here,” he said, nodding toward the building next door. “I’m waiting for her to come down.”

  At first, she hadn’t believed him. She understood that she was paranoid, but that didn’t mean she held the cure. Her new life would have to be very small indeed.

  II

  Garland

  3

  A bad apple. Grace had first noticed her mother say it about the tabby kitten Grace’s father had brought home when they’d first moved to Garland. He’d found it mewing behind the Dumpsters at his work. “There’s coolant around there,” he told Grace’s mother when he brought the kitten home.

  “He probably already drank some of it,” Grace’s mother said.

  “Well,” her father said, which was how they agreed to disagree.

  Grace named the kitten Skyler—“How about Tigger?” her mother had asked—and watched it grow, under their haphazard care, into a mean adolescent who would beg to be petted, bumping his head against their legs, and then promptly sink his fangs into the wrist or fleshy palm of whoever fell for it and tried to show him affection.

  “That cat is a bad apple,” Grace’s mother said. “He can’t help it; he’s just rotten.”

  That Skyler could not help his nature kept Grace tender toward him for longer than her parents were. Then her cousin, a boy of eighteen, went to jail for stealing credit cards out of the neighbors’ mail.

  “He’s just a bad apple,” Grace’s pregnant mother said, leaning over the sink to wash her hands. She was a home health aide and always washing her hands of something. “He stole from his own mother. You know, I caught him once, going through her drawers.”

  “You got to drop that,” her father said. “He wasn’t any older than Grace is when all that happened.”

  Her mother raised her eyebrows. Well. “It isn’t Regina’s fault. They did their best.”

  Her father took the cat—he wasn’t referred to by name once he was gone—to the shelter after he bit Grace’s ankle, unprovoked. Grace’s mother was nearly due; they couldn’t have him attacking the babies.

  In the grotesque chaos that followed the twins’ birth, Grace had assumed there was simply not enough love to go around, and the babies needed all of it. Fair enough. But the more attention her parents gave them, the more attention the suckling tantrum machines demanded. Witnessing her parents’ transformation into frazzled, intent, TV-censoring caretakers, Grace found herself evilly hoping that one of the twins would turn out to be a bad apple. She thought they were both rotten—their sopping faces, their gaping, toothless screams, their hanging drool, their fountains of diarrhea, their rashes and allergies and insomnia and sudden, terrifying squalls.

  “We didn’t think we’d have more children,” Grace’s mother said to a neighbor, who beamed back, nodding.

  One afternoon, Grace was hiding out in the basement, where it was quiet, reading a pile of old Life magazines that a neighbor had thrown out the week before, when the idea, terrible and unthinkable, crept up her shoulder like a spider: She was the bad apple. That was why her mother didn’t act right toward her, not the way she acted with the twins. It wasn’t Grace’s fault that she was a bad apple. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, but it did explain a lot of her feelings, her secret thoughts. Being rotten was like being poor, but in your heart. Nothing to be done. You get what you get and you don’t get upset.

  And she had done wretched things. That year, Grace had stolen a hundred dollars from a classmate, Deanna Passerini. Grace loathed Deanna, who would grab whatever she wanted from her classmates’ hands and lunchboxes: markers, pretzels, colored-tissue stained-glass art projects. “You’re going to break it!” someone screamed at Deanna almost every day. On her birthday, Deanna came to school brandishing a card from her aunt in Massachusetts. The card held a hundred-dollar bill, which she whipped around for all to see. How much money a hundred dollars was to a ten-year-old—a thousand! A million! That anyone would give horrible, grubby, grabby Deanna a hundred dollars seemed unholy, as if the universe had rewarded her for being so repulsive. Deanna said she was going to use the money to buy a crystal sculpture of a horse she’d seen at the mall. Grace knew she would have broken the horse right there in the store. And then she thought: I’ll show you how to take something, Deanna P. You don’t grab it.

  After lunch, when they all had bathroom break, Grace went into the stall next to Deanna’s. The four stalls were full, and a few other girls were crowded around the two sinks, washing and chattering and cranking the paper-towel dispenser. Deanna had put her new troll doll, a half-eaten bag of chips, her list of spelling words, and her birthday card right on the bathroom floor. Grace sat on the toilet with her pants up, waiting, and when she saw Deanna stand and turn to flush, she took the card. She stuck it in the waistband of her jeans, in the back, and pulled her shirt over it.

  She was at the sink when Deanna began to scream. Grace held up her empty hands, and Deanna immediately blamed Amber White, because Amber White was poor and dirty and often in trouble for misbehaving in some humiliating way—cussing obliviously or picking at her nipples through her shirt during reading circle. Grace thought then that another line on Amber’s rap sheet wouldn’t matter. Amber pushed Deanna, who roared in rage that Amber had touched her. Grace went to get the teacher and reported the theft.

  Deanna got in trouble with her parents for taking the money to school. Amber couldn’t produce the money and their teacher let the matter drop, but the other children tormented her with new vigor. Deanna, on the other hand, ascended in her victimhood. And while Grace had never seriously considered coming forward, once she saw how much further someone like Amber could fall, she knew she would never confess.

  But she didn’t know what to do with the money. She worried that it would incriminate her. She rolled the hundred in a couple of one-dollar bills and dropped it in the Salvation Army donation box just before Christmas, skinny Santa clanging the bell next to it. He smiled at her.

  She remembered Skyler, probably gassed at the shelter, with a pang of commiseration. They may not have been able to change their natures, but she could hide hers. She would have to.

  • • •

  In middle school, Deanna began to straighten her hair and go to the tanning bed. Amber White’s chest grew too big, too fast. Grace met Riley.

  You could be bad and still be a good girl, if you tried hard enough. She hadn’t tried hard enough before.

  “Kids are shits,” Riley said when she told him about stealing Deanna’s birthday money. “You can’t beat yourself up for that stuff.” They were lying face-to-face on his family’s trampoline, deep in the backyard under the shade trees, where it was cooler. Still, their hair stuck to their damp foreheads and they wiped trails of sweat from around each other’s nostrils.

  Grace cried. Stealing Deanna’s hundred-dollar bill was the worst thing she’d ever done, a
nd the worst thing she’d ever do, ever. Whenever she saw Amber at school, even now, two years later, she felt horrible all over again. Grace didn’t even know the girl who’d stolen that money. She couldn’t even fathom her.

  “I killed a finch with a slingshot once,” Riley said. “Me and Alls shot the nest out of a tree because we wanted to see the eggs, and then we shot the bird.”

  “The mother bird?” Grace gasped.

  He winced. “We were just kids.”

  Riley made it easy for Grace to be good. Her mother didn’t seem to like him much, but Grace suspected that had more to do with Grace than with Riley. But if everyone liked the Grahams, and the Grahams liked Grace, then maybe Grace’s mother had been wrong about her.

  The Grahams had given her a chance, and she was eager to show them that she could be worthy of their love. They treated Grace as if she belonged to them, and so did Riley, and she devoted herself to earning her keep. She left her frantic, lonely childhood behind to become the Grahams’ daughter and Riley’s dream girl, silky haired and shyly smiling. She knew to go wherever she was wanted.

  One afternoon the summer after Grace’s sixth-grade year, she wandered outside when Riley was playing video games and Mrs. Graham had gone out. Dr. Graham was repairing the lawn mower in the driveway, and he was startled at her appearance. “I never hear you coming, sweetie,” he said. “I’m used to thundering boy hooves.” Then she was handing him tools as he described them—“the long thingie with the spinny thingie,” he said—and listening as he explained how the motor worked. When he finished, he ruffled her dark hair and said, “Thanks, daylily!”

  “You’re so welcome!” She beamed at him, ecstatic over her first nickname.

  “My parents love you,” Riley said when she told him. “My mom really wanted to have another baby after me. She always wanted a girl, but my dad said five kids was too many kids.”

  A few weeks later, Grace was curled up on the couch in the den with Mrs. Graham watching To Catch a Thief, one of Mrs. Graham’s “glamour films,” when Dr. Graham came in late from work and poked his head around the corner.

  “I see you got your girl,” he said, and Grace, as shy as she was eager, sneaked a look at Mrs. Graham, who was nodding to her husband as she reached to smooth the blanket over Grace’s knees.

  • • •

  Grace couldn’t see then what Riley saw in her, but he was like sunlight, shining easy faith on her and eliminating the shadows. His town, from the crossing guard to the college girls scooping ice cream behind the counter at Ginny’s to the principals of their schools, adored him. He was the youngest of the four Graham boys, spirited and handsome, a prankster who liked to tell stories about the times he’d been caught and the times he should have been. He had wild red hair and uneven dimples—a face for boyish mischief—and freckles everywhere: a spray across his face, a blanket over his shoulders and down his arms. To Grace he looked vibrant, brighter than everyone else, as though sparks burst through those freckles and that hair. His manners could be almost comically courtly: He blessed strangers when they sneezed, and tipped the brim of his ball cap and said “take care” after the Ginny’s Ice Cream girls handed him his change.

  Dr. Graham was the physician for the college basketball team, a humble hero, and Mrs. Graham worked in the student counseling clinic. There was more money from the family lumber company started by Riley’s great-grandfather. But it was never about money, Grace consoled herself in later years—except by then, she understood how desperation of any kind could turn you meager, mean. The Grahams were not meager in anything. In their stacks of books and rows of inherited photo albums, their jars of mysterious condiments and overfull crisper drawers, their inside jokes and bottomless well of traditions, their boxes full of extra coats and gloves and cleats and Boogie Boards, the Grahams had only abundance.

  When she surveyed her pimply classmates—the girls who’d quickly shut her out, the boys who vacillated between buffoonery and cruelty—she felt a surge of pride, even victory, that she had Riley. Would she have wanted Greg, the overgrown baby whose father had promised him a Land Rover for his fifteenth birthday if he kept up honor roll? Would she have wanted Alls, who never went home of his own volition? No, of course not. She couldn’t believe her luck that Riley wanted her, but she was grateful, and she loved him for it.

  The June that Grace turned thirteen, she and Riley lost their virginity in an abandoned house at the edge of his neighborhood. They had been climbing through the windows of the house for months to poke around and write their initials in the dust, and they had begun to think of it as their house. They did it on the carpeted floor of one of the bedrooms—their bedroom. Neither of them was prepared for how much it would hurt Grace, and Riley kissed her all over her forehead afterward. Neither of them was prepared for the blood either, and Grace thought sex had brought her period, as if her body had rushed to catch up with her. When she got her real first period a few months later, the blood seemed both more disgusting and less substantial. It was only once Grace got older, when she was sixteen and found herself lying to a nurse about when, exactly, she had become active, that she realized she had been too young. If she and Riley hadn’t stayed together it might have become a source of shame. Instead, every secret they shared was a double knot that bound them tighter.

  Mrs. Graham clutched at Grace like a long-awaited gift. She bought Grace dresses, sweaters, books (none of her sons really liked to read, not the way she did, not the way Grace did). When Mrs. Graham laughed, she tilted her face up and her mouth opened in surprise, almost as if she were in pain. When she really laughed, at her husband or at her boys, she bit her lips together, laughing through her nose. Once, Grace, using the master bathroom, had tried on her lipstick, a shimmery plum called Crushed Rose that came in a gold tube, and tried her Mrs. Graham laugh silently in the mirror.

  Mrs. Graham even took Grace to purchase her first bra. Grace had twice started to ask her own mother, but stopped—Aiden was screaming, then her father came in—and Mrs. Graham had not needed to be asked. She took Grace aside and said, quickly and softly, smelling like grapefruit, that she needed to exchange a jacket at the mall and Grace should “come with” to “pick up a few bras.” She didn’t even make Grace answer; they just went. Later, curled up in Riley’s bed, Grace would sometimes notice one of those bras strewn on his floor amid the homework and sweaty socks, and she would feel overwhelmed with love for the Grahams, her real family. She sometimes fantasized a whole childhood as one of them—Grace Graham, the daughter Mrs. Graham had wanted—though she couldn’t tell Riley this without making it sound as though she wished she were his sister.

  4

  Riley left Garland Middle for Garland High; Grace, left behind, worried that she would begin to seem too young to him, a babyish phase he should now grow out of. After school she rushed to wherever he was, always with Alls and Greg. Greg often accused her, even in front of Riley, of trying to take Riley away from them. She laughed and Riley rolled his eyes, but Greg was right. She was jealous. No matter how long she and Riley were together, the boys had been together longer. Sometimes, it didn’t seem fair that Grace gave all her love and attention to Riley when his was spread so thin. But he wouldn’t let her in with the boys, not really, even though all of them spent so much time together. When she did the things that she thought would earn her admittance—threw an empty glass bottle at the brick back wall of their middle school, called Greg out for farting—Riley scolded her. There was one time she remembered particularly. It was after Halloween, and they were all sitting on Riley’s front porch eating leftover candy.

  “What’s a hillbilly’s favorite thing to do on Halloween?” Alls started.

  “What?” Grace asked first.

  He looked at the floor, trying to keep a straight face. “Pump kin.”

  Riley’s laugh was loudest of all. Then Grace, recovering first, said, “What did the leper say to the hooker?”

  “What?” Greg asked.

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p; It was too late; she was already grinning. “Keep the tip.”

  Alls cupped his hands over his ears in mock alarm, but he was laughing, and so was Greg. Riley was not. “Let’s go somewhere,” he said. “I’m bored out of my skull.”

  Later, when his friends had gone home, he told her that she’d embarrassed him. He framed his argument generously: “Quit trying to be a guy,” he said. “You don’t have to fake it. Just be yourself.”

  She wasn’t faking it, she started to explain. She was just—

  “But I don’t like you like that,” he said.

  Just-be-yourself had its limits. She adapted to his vision. She liked that girl more than she had ever liked herself before anyway, so that was the self she became.

  Starting that year, the boys often went to Greg’s basement after school. Greg was already drinking hard then, stealing booze from his father, who had a wet bar downstairs and drank too much to keep track of his inventory. The first time Greg offered her a screwdriver, she told him to shut up, thinking he was making fun of her. “No, I’m having one,” he said. “You’ll like it, it’s good.” Greg kept his pot down there too, right in the drawer with the party toothpicks and restaurant matchbooks, as though he wanted his father to find it.

  One night in early April, the boys were lit to the rafters and Grace was nursing her screwdriver when the boys decided to take Mrs. Kimbrough’s car out for a drive. Greg took the keys from her purse, which was next to the bed where she and Mr. Kimbrough slept. Riley had never driven so much as a lawn mower, and Greg was too bombed to get the key into the lock. Alls had learned to drive a golf cart caddying that summer. Grace protested wildly, in a whisper. She wasn’t even supposed to be there. She had snuck out of her house. Riley told her not to worry; they would drop her off at home. Alls backed Mrs. Kimbrough’s silver sports car out of the driveway, narrowly missing the brick mailbox. Greg pumped up the bass and then locked the windows to hotbox the car. Alls jabbed at the window buttons, trying to roll them down. His dad drove an old car without power windows and he couldn’t figure it out. Grace made them drop her off at the end of her block so her parents wouldn’t wake.