Unbecoming: A Novel Read online

  “Here?” Grace said, disbelieving.

  “Garland,” he sighed.

  “So go work on an oil rig. Or go to college in Kansas.” Marmie hobbled up the stairs and parked her graying head on Grace’s lap.

  “Is that what you’re planning? What do you want to be?”

  Grace Graham. Smart, rich, mother of future Grahams. “I don’t know,” she said, stroking the dog’s ears. “But my family is here.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “I’ve never even met your family. You know how weird that is in this town? There’s nobody who sees me coming and doesn’t think of my dad.”

  “I meant here,” she said, tapping her finger on the porch step. There wasn’t any reason she shouldn’t say that, and yet she felt it had been a mistake.

  A Riley whoop rang out from inside. They turned to the bay window and saw him dancing his mother across the living room floor, showing off for them, for her. They could hear Dr. Graham’s Steely Dan through the glass. Riley gave them a goofy thumbs-up. Grace waved.

  “Well, same,” Alls said to her then. She was relieved. She could tell that he’d thought she just meant Riley.

  Grace smiled. “You just need to figure out what you want.”

  “Like you did,” he said, the corner of his lip twitching.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “You did good, and you know it. I fuck up, but you never do.”

  Grace laughed, out of both habit and self-defense, and Alls nodded, looking at her in a way she did not want to be seen.

  “Stop it,” she said, standing to reach for the icy doorknob. She could hear the opening chords of “Deacon Blues,” and she wanted to join the dancing.

  • • •

  The next week, Alls quit the basketball team, right in the middle of the season. He couldn’t see faking it through February, he said, with all those people pitying him. “I don’t owe anybody anything,” he told his coach.

  Shortly after that, he started going to the college after school for fencing practice.

  “Of all the sports that could get you a scholarship, you’re going for one you’ve never done before,” Riley said. “Makes sense.”

  “Like, with the mask and shit?” Greg asked.

  “Yeah,” Alls said. “And shit.”

  “What about track?” Riley asked. “You can run.”

  “No, you don’t get it,” Alls said. “See, they have a full track team. They have a full basketball team. GC has one available scholarship, and it’s for fencing, so I’m going after it. They had a junior transfer up north midyear. Your dad’s the one who told me.”

  “I didn’t even know they had a fencing team,” Greg said.

  Alls nodded once. “Now you get it.”

  • • •

  Alls won the scholarship, possibly with a quiet assist from Dr. Graham, and would begin college only a semester behind Riley and Greg. In August, the boys rented the falling-down house on Orange Street. Riley gave her a key, and Grace made herself at home in his room upstairs, Alls in the room below and Greg down the hall.

  At first, they all basked in the freedom the house afforded them. No one had to smoke out in the woods anymore; no one hurried to push the empties under the couch at the sound of footsteps on the stairs; no one needed to wear proper clothes, buttoned and zipped. Grace lived with her parents only technically now. She spent most nights at the house on Orange Street, and though her parents didn’t like this arrangement, they were too late to intercede with any meaningful authority. When her mother protested that Grace spending the night with Riley all the time didn’t “look right,” Grace feigned confusion: to whom? The Grahams didn’t mind that she stayed over, she said. She had her own room in their house. Mrs. Graham was only grumpy that she saw less of them now. Grace dragged Riley home for dinner once a week, and she sometimes visited on her own, too.

  “Whose opinion are you worried about, Mother?” Grace asked with airy chill.

  In the house on Orange Street, Greg ambled around stoned in his shorts, not even bothering to hide his morning Kimbroner. Alls left his pipe on the kitchen table and made out with Jenna from Ginny’s Ice Cream on the sofa, not caring who saw them. Riley and Grace were as loud as they pleased. For the past four years they had been sneaking around together, and now there was no sneaking to do.

  Grace planned to start at Garland College the next year. She was graduating second in her class and she’d scored very well on the SAT, and she was confident that she would get a scholarship. She would major in art history, a complement to Riley’s talent. After college, they would get married. That was the plan.

  At night she looked through Riley’s coursework, greedy to learn something, anything. With the boys graduated, there was nothing left for Grace in high school. She’d already read Beowulf and 1984; she’d read them last year, when Riley had, and now she had to listen to her peers’ slow-motion jawing—“it’s like our world, but not”—as if they were underwater. She should have petitioned to graduate early, she knew, but she hadn’t, and now there was nothing to do but stare at the horizon and wait, both for graduation and for the three o’clock bell.

  • • •

  In December, Grace came back to the house one day after school, wheeled her bicycle into the shed, and went inside thinking that no one was home. She took a can of High Life from the refrigerator and flopped down on the green plaid couch in front of the picture window with Macbeth and a highlighter. She unzipped her jeans to get comfortable and flexed and pointed her bare feet in the sun. It was warm for December, warmer on the sun-soaked couch, and she drifted off with her highlighter in her hand. She woke suddenly, and she didn’t know why until she saw, through the doorway, Alls in the kitchen on the floor, cleaning up the aftermath of a dropped take-out container. Sticky brown food was strewn across the vinyl.

  “I was trying to be quiet,” he said. “I spilled some on your book.”

  Macbeth was still resting on her stomach. Now she moved it to cover her undone fly. “What book?”

  “Uh, What Work Is?” he asked, if it were a question. He nodded toward the paperback. “I don’t know; it was on the microwave.”

  “It was?” She thought it had been on the floor at the top of the stairs. “Do you like it?”

  “It’s all right,” he said. He came in and dropped the book on the couch next to her. “I didn’t realize it was going to be poetry.” But they were both looking at the cover as he said this. What Work Is, it read. Philip Levine. Poems.

  “It’s fine to read poetry on purpose,” she teased him. “I won’t tell on you.”

  He rolled his eyes. “I just read whatever’s laying around.”

  “So, lots of poetry,” she said. “Because all the books are mine.”

  She thought he would laugh then, but he didn’t, and she felt that she had made a misstep. “I shouldn’t be sleeping right now,” Grace yawned, trying to help him. “How was work?”

  “Fine. Smelly. Found a bat in a bakery oven,” he said on his way back to the mess on the kitchen floor.

  Alls helped two men out of Pitchfield repair commercial bakery equipment. He’d had the job since he’d gotten his driver’s license.

  “Gross! How long had it been there?”

  “No eyeballs.”

  “Yikes,” she said, but then she must have drifted off again, because when she awoke to a wet thumb wiping at her cheek, she thought at first that it belonged to Alls.

  “You have a pink stripe here,” Riley said. “Like a neon scar.” She stretched out her arms and he groaned, happy to collapse in the sun with her. “You smell like sleep,” he said, and she closed her eyes again.

  That night, restless from napping, Grace woke up and watched the headlights from the street sweeping across the wall, only half-conscious of the noise from downstairs. Riley was stretched out next to her, flat on his back like a dead man, with his feet splayed out under the blanket. The highlighter hadn’t come off when sh
e’d washed her face. She reached for the stripe with her tongue, as far up her cheek as it would reach, and she thought she could still taste the ink. The noise was right under them, in Alls’s room, a slow, insistent thud, and at first she wondered, blearily, if he was practicing, doing drills or something. Not until she heard a quick, shrill coo did she realize what she was hearing.

  Alls had certainly heard them before; he must have.

  Suddenly conscious of her own breath, embarrassed at the sound of Riley’s gentle snoring, as though Alls might hear that, Grace swallowed and closed her eyes, trying to force herself back to sleep. But now she was holding her breath to listen. She heard his cursing laugh as his bare mattress slid across the floor, and she slid her hand beneath her underwear’s elastic. In a minute she was silently flipping onto her stomach, already groping for an explanation should Riley wake as she shifted, but he didn’t, and when they finished in the room beneath her, she was soon after, face hidden in her pillow, not quite deaf.

  She left for school the next morning before anyone else was awake, stealing out of the house ashamed for the first time. That evening she and Riley went to dinner at his family’s, and then she told Riley she would go home, sleep at her parents’.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I need some more clothes. Look, I had to wear your shirt today. And it’s dirty.”

  She managed to avoid Alls until the next night, and then she crossed him in the hallway. He was coming out of the bathroom, his shaggy hair dripping. He was in a towel, for crying out loud. She stared at the wet hairs down his belly. She wanted to slap herself at the stupid cliché of her desire.

  Instead she went into the steam-fogged bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub.

  What was this feeling? She knew lust. She knew lust well. Lust had been a friend to her, a good listener and a great talker, a fine mood on a sunny day. Lust belonged to her. She did what she wanted with her lust. But this feeling was not that feeling, so what the fuck was it? Like the sharp pain in her sinuses before rain began to fall, this feeling blinded and dizzied her, obscured her brain in clouds. She was invaded by lust.

  This lust was like falling down icy stairs, like discovering blood pouring from her shin as she shaved in the shower. She’d known Alls for years! This lust couldn’t be real—it was hormones, or her birth control, or something contagious from Shakespeare, or autumn. This feeling was too stupid to feel.

  Suddenly worried that Alls might be listening to her, she flushed the toilet and then felt only more embarrassed. How long had she been sitting here on the edge of the tub? The smell of the steam had overwhelmed her. She had walked right into her own trap. What was boy smell but a choice of deodorant plus the sweat of whatever he ate and drank? Alls and Riley ate and drank all the same things. Their sweat was probably the same. She had just become confused in this half-Riley steam, that was all. She pulled back the shower curtain and grimaced at the grime along the bottom of the tub. She knew which shampoo was Riley’s and she could guess which one was Greg’s. The Head & Shoulders had to be Alls’s. She uncapped the bottle and inhaled.

  At the knock on the bathroom door, she jerked the bottle into her nose.

  “Hey, you want ice cream? Want to walk up to Ginny’s?” Riley asked her.

  “Yeah,” she said, her voice like a car horn. “Yeah, I’ll be right out.”

  She washed her hands with her own lavender-and-vanilla-scented soap and waved her hands around together as she lathered them, trying to fill the room with her own smell and clear out the smell of Alls, which seemed incriminating. She kept a single perfume sample in her toiletry bag, rationing dabs of it for special occasions. She rubbed it into her wrists and the hollow of her throat, filling her nose with peachy floral relief.

  Riley was waiting by the door. He flared his nostrils, sniffing. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I’m just happy to see you.” And she was—she was profoundly assured by the sight of him, the smell of him.

  “You smell good,” he said. “I love that.”

  At Ginny’s, though, Grace watched Jenna’s fingers around the scoop, her forearm raking through the mint chip, and felt a hot, nauseous revulsion. “Six dollars,” Jenna chirped to Riley. She had the voice of a camp counselor and a chin like a dinner roll. Grace tried to smile.

  Riley tipped the brim of his cap to Jenna and waved.

  “See you later!” she sang.

  That night Grace found herself blinking at the dark wall again. Some malicious part of her had shaken her awake. The room downstairs was silent. Not since silly, obvious Madison Grimes had Grace felt the tightening in her chest, the quickening in the air, that made her look for a predator circling above. But this time the threat was right inside her.

  She shook her head against her pillow. The line from Grace to her future was as straight as she could draw it. She reached for Riley’s hand, clammy in sleep, and held it tight in hers.

  The next day she decided to buy the perfume Riley liked, as if it were a kind of armor. Grace had been blindsided by her feelings, but she would not be defeated by them. She borrowed Riley’s car and drove to the mall. At the perfume counter, she found the twisted glass and silver bottle on a tester tray and sprayed her wrist. The wet puddle dripped in all directions. Too much.

  “How much is this?” she asked when the saleswoman approached her.

  “That one is sixty-five for the eau de parfum.” She bent to retrieve the blue box from beneath the counter.

  “Oh,” Grace said. “Does it come in a smaller—”

  “There’s a lotion,” the woman said. “But nothing smaller.”

  Grace hadn’t thought it would be so much. “I guess I need to think about it.”

  “The bottle will last you a long time,” the woman said, “if you just spritz a little of it.”

  “Right,” Grace said. “Well, thank you anyway.”

  The woman bent to put the box back. Grace fingered the tops of the other perfume bottles. She was startled to find that her heart was pounding.

  The woman was on the other side of the counter now, helping someone else. Grace picked up the tester bottle again and dropped it into her tote bag before she could give herself another second to think. She heard the bottle clink against her key ring and felt her head seem to lift off her body. She turned away from the counter and slipped into the racks of handbags, disappearing behind a Christmas-garlanded pillar. Her hands were on fire, trembling on the strap of the purse she pretended to examine.

  In the parking lot, she hurried among the rows of cars, forgetting where she’d parked. When she finally sank into the driver’s seat, she locked the door and then let her head fall back, her mouth open. The blood in her veins slowed. She closed her eyes and licked her lips, victorious and exhausted, her rite completed.

  When she got home Alls was in the kitchen making a peanut butter sandwich. “I didn’t know you wore perfume,” he said.

  “It’s new,” she said stiffly. “How’s Jenna?” She winced at the sharpness in her voice.

  “Fine, I guess.” He shrugged. “Jenna. Jenna is always fine. Jolly Jenna.”

  “Yikes,” Grace said. “She certainly likes you.”

  “What, you jealous?” When their eyes met Grace nearly lost all her courage. He had said that before, other times over the years, but it had been different then, a joke that came through the wire intact. She feared she was blushing, but she fastened her eyes to his and forced herself not to let go. She had to conquer this.

  “I heard her the other night,” Grace said. “Liking you.”

  He was screwing the cap onto the peanut butter jar. His eyebrows crawled together.

  “She’s pretty shrill,” Grace said.

  “So we’re going there now,” he said. “You know I’ve been deaf and mute in the next room for years, and now you’re going there.”

  “That little cheeping noise was cute,” she said. “Like a duckling.”

  His smirk of di
sbelief threatened to break. She’d made him angry. Good.

  Instead he laughed. “You were listening pretty hard. You’ve given it some real thought.” He covered his eyes, low laughter rumbling from his belly. “Jesus. You are such a psycho, he has no idea.”

  “Oh, he knows,” she said quickly, as if that were a clever retort. She opened the refrigerator door, but there wasn’t much inside. Her fingers were trembling. She took the nearly empty carton of orange juice just to have something to do. She raised the carton of juice and finished it there.

  “Do you want to know how you sound?” he asked.

  • • •

  The lust spread like poison ivy, and as the itching got worse and worse, Grace worried that she wouldn’t be able to leave it alone. Scratching was obviously out of the question; to do so would be to undo her life, to erase herself, to become Amber White. That was not a choice she would ever make. But the new lust crawled around her, forbidden but making a home. Neither she nor Alls ever brought up their conversation in the kitchen again, but when they caught each other’s eyes, Grace was terrified that Riley would see a flash there, would sense that something had happened.

  At Christmas, while foraging for extra wrapping paper in the basement, Mrs. Graham showed Grace her wedding dress, hanging in plastic on a rack. “Do you want to see?” she asked Grace, who said yes, of course she did. Mrs. Graham lovingly unzipped the plastic and fingered the lace. “I was just your size,” she said. “Can you believe it?”

  Ten minutes later, Grace was wearing the dress, blushing wildly, and Mrs. Graham was crying next to a pile of outgrown sports equipment.

  “When you get married, we’ll put flowers in your hair,” Mrs. Graham said.

  Grace embraced her, burying her nose in Mrs. Graham’s shoulder and watching the basement stairs for Riley’s feet. She didn’t want him to see her in his mother’s wedding dress. Mrs. Graham’s bridal portrait hung in the dining room. Grace knew it by heart—her downcast eyes, the bouquet of magnolias at her waist. The image of Grace costumed as his mother might be a hard one for Riley to shake. But if Grace could have stayed in the basement wearing Mrs. Graham’s wedding dress forever, she might have.