Child's Pose
by Gaby Edwards
Image: “Goodbye Childhood” by Christopher Bolduc
A phone call interrupts the session, jolting Nora back into Jeff’s room mid-sentence. It’s almost impressive, how easily she can talk to him without hearing herself. As if there’s an invisible teleprompter and she can click herself mute.
With a tap, she sends her Dad to voicemail and picks up where they left off: with her glopping a thick coat of mascara onto Jeff’s lashes, tying his wrists to a bedpost, and narrating, while crisscrossed on the carpet, how all the boys he plays pick-up basketball with are going to…
“They’re going to paint your nails and shave your legs,” she says, hovering a pink disposable razor over his ankle. “Right in the middle of the court. In front of everyone. Pathetic.”
It’s hard to look at him, his face twisted in delight, so her eyes bounce around the room instead. Not much has changed since high school. Pinstriped, linen bedding with dark orange curtains. A framed psychedelic poster above a teak desk. It’s small and boyish, but surprisingly tasteful.
Still, the sessions remind her of playing dress-up. Like when she and her childhood friends would wiggle into scratchy princess dresses and chase boys around, demanding they strip and become Cinderella. Cornered, they’d act indignant, but never ran away that fast either.
“You like your legs smooth, don’t you?” she continues. “And you want to smell girly, right? Well, hopefully, next time the boys bring you some perfume. Like the one from Kopari. It helps fight inflammation.”
She always reroutes the conversation from courtside blowjobs to beauty products. Channeling her inner influencer helps pass the time. And that’s what he pays for.
Twice a week, she rambles at Jeff’s for an hour, then pockets six crisp hundreds. The rest of the week is hers. All 166 hours to do as she pleases. Walk down Melrose, watch movies with her boyfriend, crochet halter tank tops. What more could a 22-year-old ask for?
When the timer dings, Nora excuses herself to the bathroom. The walls, floor, even the ceiling are covered in pistachio-green mosaic tile. It’s like being trapped inside a breath mint. Except it smells like Jeff.
“Give me a second,” she calls out after a knock, rummaging for a washcloth in the built-in cabinet.
But there’s nothing clean, only expired sunscreen and unopened tissues emulsified with coconut lotion. Grimacing, she heads for the dirty towel sticking out of the hamper, but something else snags her attention: A white shirt with a swarm of butterflies. Years ago, Nora bought this tee for her best friend, Veronica, and airbrushed an inside joke across the chest: She sang Blink-182 during the apocalypse.
The heat whisks in her ears, rushing down her neck with the realization that Veronica was here, undressing recently.
Nora digs into her pockets, then pats her body down, hoping to find some token of herself to leave behind, saying hello after all these years. Her roaming hand lands on a ring, a clunky silver signet, scratched and dull from overuse. She tucks it between two deodorant sticks and slides the drawer closed.
It’s hard to remember how it all started. Maybe junior year Calculus class, when Veronica and Nora began tormenting Jeff. Photoshopping pictures of his face onto war criminals. Spamming his email with fake credit card offers. One day, he pulled them aside and asked if they would record videos of themselves, saying he had a perfect dick, for $100. Veronica agreed. Nora followed.
They promised to keep it a secret from their larger circle of popular friends. Jeff wasn’t the lowest of the low, but he was still suspect. An obvious pervert, openly discussing what he jacked off to or how badly he wanted to bend over Ms. Chan, the chubby chemistry teacher with bacne. Associating with him would’ve been too deviant for girls with an insecure position in the social hierarchy.
Nora, however, assumed that Veronica cut him off years ago, around the time she started announcing prestigious internships on LinkedIn and stopped responding to Nora’s texts. From what little Nora has gathered online, Veronica seems steadily employed and steadily surrounded by the same group of girls from high school. After graduation, they all attended public universities in the Midwest, even though they still had to pay out-of-state tuition. That’s probably all they have in common, Nora guessed, being ripped off. She didn’t go to college. She stayed home with her Dad, bouncing between odd jobs until she landed at Jeff’s, the oddest one yet.
“Remember,” Jeff calls from the other side of the wall. “That if you’re going to go number two, use the downstairs bathroom.”
“I’m not a cat,” she scolds, opening the door. “Don’t tell me where my litter box is.”
“Bet you’d find that hot. Telling me where to piss.”
Maybe he assumes that because she panders to his depravity for a couple of hours a week, they’re the same. That she gets off on it too. But Nora’s vanilla. Even speaking in a breathy voice or moaning too loudly during sex makes her vibrate with embarrassment.
One time, she tried calling herself “a bad girl” to see if it would make her boyfriend, Owen, cum faster.
“Oh, yeah?” He’d grinned, instantly pumping harder. “What’d you do?”
Floored by the follow-up question, she just stuttered, her mind blank. “It’s bad. Too bad… I can’t say.”
As she grabs the cash from Jeff, she stares at his neck, how wide and veiny it is. Has he always had the body of a retired linebacker? Then there are his cheeks, craggy with acne scars. And his jellybean teeth, some of the smallest that Nora has ever seen. Yet somehow, with each session, she finds him less ugly, more fraternal. He’s seen it all: her braces, her bra-size yo-yo, her skin pimpled then glowing. He reminds her that she’s existed longer than this day, this hour.
Her phone buzzes. She hits “Ignore.”
“Whose blowing up your phone?”
“My Dad,” she says. “Don’t worry about it.”
He checks the time. “Shit, it’s almost four. You gotta go before my mom gets here.”
On her way home, rain lashes the windshield as the streetlight glows red. Five years. That’s how long it’s been since Nora and Veronica last spoke, since the distance Veronica mysteriously enforced. Her stomach turns, imagining them. Jeff and Veronica. The mattress groaning under their weight. How much does he pay for that? It doesn’t seem like she needs the money.
Nora parks outside the main house, where her Dad lives with his around-the-clock team of nurses. She and Owen live in the detached guest house. They moved here three years ago, before her Dad got sick but after he made a series of unwise investments into a solar tech company that forced them to downsize to this ranch-style house on a boulevard that screeches with rush hour traffic.
Passing through the backyard, brown sage bushes and shriveled deer grass tickle her shins. The rain will help, but it could be too late. Even with his mind in tatters, her Dad always managed to tend the garden with painstaking consideration, but these last few weeks have been different. Things die quickly when they’re forgotten.
“It’s the neighbors,” he snapped when she asked why he had stopped watering the coyote mint. “They’re sprinkling poison all over the yard at night.”
That was the last time she tried arguing with him.
“Hi Monkey,” Owen says as she swings open the front door.
“Hi Peanut.”
“How was babysitting?”
“Oh, you know.” She hangs her raincoat on the hook. “Little devils.” With her heel, she kicks her boots off before tossing an old Band-Aid from her pocket into the trash, spotting a McDonald’s paper bag. It doesn’t seem like he left any extra.
“And how are you?”
“Good,” he says. “Very good, actually. I’m making great strides in A Thousand Plateaus.”
The armchair that usually holds her heap of dirty clothes is empty: everything’s been laundered, folded, put away by Owen. As if, in her absence, he transforms into the magic forest animals from Snow White.
She turns to look at him, to scrutinize him for fairy dust or mouse ears, but all she notices are his sharp cheekbones, how they catch the grey, shadowy light. He’s as thin and delicate as a Victorian chimney sweep but eats cheeseburgers with special sauce for lunch three times a week.
“Your Dad called,” Owen says. “He was looking for you.”
“If it were urgent, the nurse would call too,” she responds with unwarranted bitterness. “Did I ever tell you about my friend, Veronica?”
“Veronicaaaaa,” he repeats back to her slowly, unveiling his California accent. “Did we ever meet?”
“Oh, no. We stopped being friends before we got together.”
“Oh, Veronica!” He clasps his hands. “She’s the one you’d slap at parties.”
She recalls the first time Veronica slapped her. A mildewy bathroom in the San Fernando Valley with pink grout between the tiles and a limp snake plant on the sill. Nora sloppy from tequila and an overestimation of her weed tolerance; Veronica drunk in a giggly way, tossing her head back with breathy cackles like she was trying to swallow rain. The edges were growing darker for Nora, tightening.
“Hit me,” Nora requested. “Not too hard, but hard enough that I come back.”
She thought this might take some convincing, but before she could even stand up straight, Veronica slapped her. Afterward, they both doubled over with laughter, chest to knees, gripping the rim of the sink for balance and falling into a guilty, hopeless hysteria. Deep pulls of laughter stretched from their stomachs and snapped onto the floor.
“Why do you ask?” Owen wonders.
“I thought I drove past her today, and it depressed me. We went to high school together, but I wasn’t sure if she came back after college.”
She pulls the dust-filled quilt over her lap and rubs her eyes.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Nora clicks her tongue. She hates when Owen asks this question. Of course, she wants to talk about it. Why ask unless you’re secretly hoping the answer will be no?
Not wanting to fight, she presses on, “She stopped talking to me right before we started college. I mean, when she started college.”
“What did you do?”
“What do you mean? One day, she just stopped responding to my messages. Or she’d respond three days later without really moving the conversation forward. So after a few months, I decided to wait and see if she’d reach out. Never happened.”
“And you never figured out why?”
Well, at least not completely. There was an inciting incident, but it couldn’t possibly explain everything. A week before they stopped talking, Nora was caught snooping on Veronica’s phone. Searching in her texts for something incriminating. Nora didn’t find anything, but she didn’t have to.
“Well, some people,” Owen continues, “When they’re unhappy, just need to start over. Completely blank slate.”
“I don’t need a psych evaluation. Thanks.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, a few seconds later. “I’m being testy.”
He kisses her forehead and rubs the spot with his thumb. “I love you, Monkey. Maybe you should just forget about her. She doesn’t sound like a very good friend, anyway.”
“But there were good times too,” she whines, and her childishness clogs her throat.
The following week, Nora is back at Jeff’s, pulling apart his bathroom after the timer dings for more signs of Veronica, but this time, there’s no sign of her, no trace, only evidence of his chronic sinus infections and excessive earwax production. Not to worry. She came prepared with a fresh Lucky Strike pack, one lucky cigarette flipped upside down. The kind they always smoked in the 7/11 parking lot near school. Next time, a tube of tanning lotion in the medicine cabinet. The kind Veronica always smeared on her thighs, that turned the valleys between her fingers sunset orange. She smiles. It’s not a game until everyone makes their first move.
When they first met, Veronica had Nora believing in nominative determinism. She was as tall as there were syllables in her name, with a curly bouquet of fine golden hair and a thin, sharp nose. At first, they eyed each other warily. Through some transitive property, they ended up in the same friend group, and it was usually one or the other who’d become the moving target of ridicule.
But out of the blue, sophomore year, Veronica asked to keep Nora company while she recovered from wisdom teeth surgery, and Nora agreed, surprising herself because she usually avoided spending time with people she didn’t know one-on-one. Maybe it was the Vicodin because, within hours, they were lying in her bed, giggling, watching The Simpsons. Every thirty minutes, Veronica would hit Nora’s bong and blow the smoke directly into the back of Nora’s throat so she wouldn’t get an infection.
In public, they still acted prickly around each other. Annoyed. But it was a game, wasn’t it? They didn’t hold each other accountable for what they said in front of others. That was in order to survive. It was what happened in private that was real.
Sometimes Nora imagines Veronica behind the shower curtain at Jeff’s, watching her as she rifles through his cabinets, finding Veronica’s souvenirs and leaving behind her own. The thought makes her hands twitch, her heart pleasantly somersault. She feels closest to Veronica in this room. As if Jeff’s bathroom were a portal that opened up telepathic communication between them. Language distilled down to a game of show and tell. Even though every memento Nora left behind has been unanswered, they’ve all disappeared, gone somewhere. Or maybe Jeff’s thrown them all away. To the untrained eye, it’s all trash.
Until one day, a note appears, folded and wrinkled like old leather: WAIT FOR ME. In Veronica’s unmistakable slanted handwriting. Her tongue suddenly feels too big, too wet, for her mouth. Even though she’s been fantasizing about this moment, this reunion, now that it’s suddenly here, she feels completely unprepared. Like a nightmare where she steps on stage, opening night, and forgets all her lines.
It’s also her three-year anniversary with Owen, and it occurs to Nora that Veronica might have seen her Instagram story commemorating the special day and intentionally planted the note to coincide.
She and Owen have dinner reservations in two hours, and they were going to drive together, but maybe she could just meet him there. She fires off a text that the nanny is running late, and he understands. He always understands.
With the note stuffed in Nora’s bra, the corner of the paper gently pricking her skin, she finds a way to stall at Jeff’s, assuming Veronica will walk through the door at any moment and whisk her away. She sits twirling on a barstool, asking Jeff to rank his favorite Smashing Pumpkins albums, to rate his Super Mario Bros skills on a scale of one to fifty-seven, but after twenty minutes of digressions, he escorts her to the front door.
In Los Angeles, it’s a sign of affluence to live on a narrow, winding street because it means you live in the hills and can afford to replace your side-view mirrors every two months when they inevitably get clipped by a barreling car. In Nora’s case, the steepness of the road helps. She parks down the hill and looks up towards his front door.
As time passes, her focus is like fertilizer to the growing pile of wrappers and paper bags by her feet. There are now five minutes until her reservation. Owen’s nearly there, a thought that makes her lightheaded. How long will he stay without her? It’s electrifying to imagine him driving, parking, stepping up to the host stand, and saying, “Owen, table for two.” All the while, she’s here, creating an entirely new reality for herself.
All these years, she’s been too proud to reach out and beg for Veronica’s friendship or forgiveness or attention. But it suddenly feels inevitable that the way back into Veronica’s life isn’t through a sniveling text or thoughtful, handwritten letter. Maybe other people need to talk about boundaries and communication breakdowns to move on. They just needed another game.
When Nora’s back spasms, she crawls into the backseat to stretch, bending her hips into a child’s pose.
“Nora?”
The voice is muffled by the window. Her heart rattles in her chest as she sits up straight and rolls the back window down.
“The homeless shelter is that way,” Jeff says, pointing down the road with one hand, holding a beagle in the other.
She laughs a little too loudly.
“It’s almost dark out.”
“Nice leash you got there,” she observes, trying to be casual. “Why don’t you try it on for me?”
He laughs, but her words hang there. As his eyes glaze over, she can feel his affection disintegrating, her power wilting.
“Hold up,” he says, as she reaches for the door handle.
“Wanna talk inside or something—”
“It’s actually not a good time.”
“Are your parents home?”
“Not exactly,” he says, walking to the passenger side and opening the back door. The dog jumps in front of him and nestles onto Nora’s lap.
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you.”
“Mhm…”
“There’s someone inside. A special someone, actually.”
Right then she looks up, just in time to catch a flash of Veronica’s profile at the bay window. The color drains from Nora’s face and collects in a pool by her feet. She swallows hard as he watches her digest the information. A few seconds pass while he clears his throat.
“What’s she doing there?”
“Just lowkey happened.”
She’s about to ask what that’s supposed to mean when it suddenly dawns on her.
“Just to be clear,” she says, face blank, though she feels a jolt of venom. “She’s dating you for free?”
“She’s not a fucking prostitute.”
“Well,” Nora scoffs, “Not anymore.”
The dog shifts in her lap, its heart beating rapidly against her thigh. He wipes a band of sweat from his hairline.
“She saw you stalking me from the window.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We can’t hang out anymore.” He exhales, suddenly looking relieved. “She doesn’t like it.”
Nora feels something inside her split open. Maybe he should be the one holding the lip gloss, tying her wrists. The whole time, she assumed that he felt lucky to be near her. Like this was still high school. Like the distinction between popular and unpopular still mattered four years after graduation, when everyone has moved cities, moved apartments, or just moved on.
“It’s been real, though,” he continues. “Would happily refer you to one of my friends.”
And with that, she crawls up to the front seat and locks the car from the inside, watching Jeff’s teeth grind when he hears the click.
“You’re scaring me,” she says in mock alarm, scooting towards the window. “Please don’t hurt me,” she yells a little louder, praying that Veronica can hear.
“Like I would ever assault you,” he says. “Or anyone,” after a beat.
He leans over Nora, reaching for the unlock button, but she bats him back. He lunges again, his elbow catching her stomach, causing her to yelp. Sitting up and nosediving into his neck, it feels rubbery when her teeth sink in, salt flooding her tongue. Finally getting his hand past her, he slaps his thick finger onto the unlock button. The door flies open as he pulls himself away and grabs the beagle.
“Your girlfriend’s a fucking lesbian,” she shrieks as he stumbles out of the car.
With adrenaline still gnawing at her veins, she texts Owen that she can’t make it tonight. She types out the words we need to talk, then deletes them, instead opting for just got into a lil car accident. all good but it’s a whole thing. Srry!!
When her phone rings, she instinctively picks it up. “Hello?”
“Nora!” her Dad chastises. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”
“Oh,” she sputters. A coil of regret in her throat. “I’m sorry.”
“Are you coming to my birthday party?”
“What?”
“Aren’t you coming?”
His birthday was two months ago.
“Aren’t you coming?” he asks again, a desperation so vivid and hopeless in his voice that it curdles something inside her.
“Yeah,” she says. “I’ll be there soon.”
But instead of taking a left on Fairfax toward home, she ends up across the street from her childhood home, a Spanish Colonial with a veranda and terracotta roof tiles that, with three years of distance, seems fit for the royal family. The road’s recently been repaved, and the desert willow trees are blooming, spangled with purple, trumpet-shaped flowers.
She closes her eyes, presses her foot on the gas, and thunks the front bumper into a palm tree at seven miles per hour. If only the rats would scurry down and recognize her. She wants the air in her lungs to turn to cement. It’s not enough to stand before the passage of time. She wants it to grind her into dust.
Gaby Edwards is a writer and film/TV producer living in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Review, Parcel Magazine, and Barnard's literary magazine, Echoes.
Christopher Bolduc is from New Hampshire. He lives in South Korea. You can find him online at gymnasiapress.com.