Cartwheel (34 page)

Lily was, she realized, monstrously thirsty. She padded down the ladder and went to the bathroom to guzzle water directly from the faucet. When she stood up, she caught sight of herself in the mirror and startled. What was wrong with her face? Her eyes were raccooned with makeup, of course, but that wasn’t it. Last night Lily had thought she looked a bit fierce—masquerading semi-convincingly as the kind of girl that she was secretly intimidated by—and normally in the mornings after a night out she just looked goofy, like a person whose Halloween costume had fallen apart because they were having too much fun at the party. What was it that looked different now? Lily leaned closer and studied her face. Recently, faint sickle-shaped lines had appeared around her mouth; Lily had known, on some level, that these were wrinkles—fetal wrinkles, proto-wrinkles, whatever—but still she’d regarded them up until now as temporary blemishes, something she might yet grow out of, like acne. She pulled away from the mirror. The lines were barely visible, but they were there, and they were, she realized, part of the reason she looked different: She looked older. Not old, of course—but old enough to seem a little less victorious
in sloppiness, like a person whose immaculate beauty has faded enough that their stern glasses finally really do look dowdy. In the morning light—makeup smeared, hair disastrous—Lily didn’t seem like a person whose costume was unimportant. She seemed like a person whose costume was very important indeed. Lily bent and scrubbed her face, leaving black streaks on the hand towel, then furiously scrubbed at that until the motion stopped her. She threw the towel helplessly in the hamper, trying not to think about who might find it, and retreated back down the hallway.

The sun was still coiling around the bedroom, gathering itself up into corners, as Lily climbed back into bed. There was a ray of light on her pillow. Maybe it wasn’t violating at all, the way the light snuck in like this—maybe it was lovely. It meant that there could be beauty, benevolent and unasked for and all around you, even if you didn’t know it. There was something bittersweet about this, but perhaps there was also something hopeful. Soon enough, Lily would be on the other side of breaking up with Sebastien. And soon enough, Lily would be awake early enough for this light; she vowed to remember it, to set an alarm to gratefully greet it. But not today. Today, she was tired. And so Lily lay back down—deliciously, guiltily, with the decadent weariness of the newly old—and sank back into sleep.

When Lily woke again, it was ludicrously late, the light outside her window already aging. Sleeping into the afternoon always gave Lily a dreadful feeling—as though she’d wasted an entire life, not only part of a day—and she bolted upright. She looked at the clock and scoffed. It was almost three-thirty. There was a real possibility she was going to be late for work.

Ten minutes later Lily was racing along Avenida Cabildo; above her, the skies were opening up into an uncharacteristic late afternoon rain, contributing to her general sense of persecution. She arrived at Fuego soaking wet but only five minutes late. Javier was sitting at the
end of the bar poring over some papers. He shot Lily a subtle smirk. She ducked her head and hurried to grab her apron, trying to look diligent and humble. But when she glanced back in Javier’s direction, she saw that he was motioning her over to him. This felt ominous, though Lily reminded herself that absolutely everything today felt ominous. She walked to the end of the bar.

“Hey, Javier,” she said. “What’s up?”

“Feeling okay today, Lily?”

She laughed ruefully and bobbled her hand back and forth. “Not too bad. A little tired.”

“Well, don’t worry about that. You can go home now.”

“What?” Lily gestured toward the break room, where the schedule was posted on the wall. “I’m on the schedule for tonight.”

“I know, Lily,” said Javier. “But it’s not working out.”

“What?” Lily felt like she’d bitten on a blade. “Why?”

“I expect my customers to make scenes, not my waitresses.”

“What?” Had Lily made a scene? Maybe, by very, very puritan standards, she had. “But it was my birthday,” she said, inanely.

“Well, your birthday present is you got to make a scene,” said Javier. “Happy birthday. Now you’re fired.”

“But I mean, I wasn’t even working. I mean, I was off the clock.”

“Yes. It was a favor for you.”

“Doesn’t that mean I was just a customer? So I get to make a scene, too?” Lily laughed lightly, but Javier did not.

“Really, Lily, did you actually like this job? Did you think you were any good at it?”

Actually, yes: Lily had thought she was good at it. She’d thought she was okay at it, at any rate, and getting better. She’d thought that the customers and the other staff liked her. They laughed and jovially caroused whenever she came around, anyway, and she’d always thought that this was good-natured, maybe even fond. But just like things with Beatriz, and Sebastien, and all men, and possibly all things and all people, Lily saw now that perhaps there had been a different, more menacing undercurrent to all of this teasing—something she hadn’t detected,
or had willfully mistranslated, in order to be happy. “I did like this job,” said Lily. “I do like it.”

Javier’s face softened a bit, and he said, “Well, I’m sorry, Lily. But I know you don’t actually need this job.”

“I’ve never been fired before.”

“Have you ever worked before?”

At this, shamefully, Lily’s eyes filled with tears. Why did everybody always want to think the worst of her? “Of course,” she said emphatically, and waited a moment to see if this might earn her a reprieve. When she saw it wasn’t going to, she told Javier she’d go clean out her locker.

A few minutes later, armed with her water bottle, book, and street shoes, Lily walked out into the already diminishing day. The rain had stopped. She really never had been fired before; it had been years and years, in fact, since she’d been in any kind of trouble at all, if you didn’t count Beatriz’s scoldings. She was still shaky from the conversation’s blunt smash of adrenaline—so much like the brief narcotizing energy that comes, when you’re hurt, just fractionally earlier than pain.

“Hey.”

Lily turned. It was Ignacio the Tortoise, leaning up against the side of a dumpster. Lily flashed to the image she’d seen—or thought she’d seen—of Ignacio and Katy, his hands on her ass, flashing in the strobe lights. Lily had wanted to ask Katy about it last night, but she’d been so drunk that she couldn’t be certain, and now that she and Katy had finally fought and reached a delicate, tentative peace, she wasn’t sure she’d want to reopen the issue.

“Hey,” said Lily. “I just got fired.”

Ignacio shook his head. “Bad luck,” he said. Lily could smell the pungent stink of weed. He must have just been smoking.

“I guess. Hey.” Lily felt suddenly bold. She was already a derelict employee—she might as well be a minor criminal, too. “Can I buy any of that from you?”

Ignacio raised his eyebrows in an expression of amusement. “Of course,” he said. “You want a baggie?”

“Um, I guess so.”

Ignacio began reaching into his backpack.

“Oh, now?” said Lily.

Ignacio looked around the empty alleyway. “You want to do it later?”

“No, no,” said Lily. “Now is great.”

Ignacio nodded and produced a small plastic bag with a few black rosettes in it. “For you, forty pesos,” he said. Lily was hoping he would hurry. “A discount. Since you’ve had a rough day.”

Lily found a damp fifty-peso bill in her purse, then handed it to Ignacio and grabbed the baggie. Sweat was breaking out on her back, and she scurried away from him without taking any of the change. “Thanks,” she called behind her, as she walked out of the alleyway and into the street.

“Hey,” said Ignacio. “Anytime.”

Lily turned onto the street and immediately nearly ran into a woman with an army of tiny dogs trotting alongside her. The dogs were so small that their heads bobbed savagely at the pace they were going; the smallest dog’s eyes were white with cataracts that shone like mother-of-pearl.

“Permiso,” Lily muttered. The woman gave her a look and walked away.

Lily would not tell Sebastien about the firing, she decided, as she headed toward the Subte. She would not tell Sebastien, or Katy, or Beatriz, or anyone. She could not bear to. And anyway, she could probably find a use for the freedom of nights with nowhere to go and no one to answer to. Lily’s awareness of the baggie in her purse was contracting and relenting like a pulse. She had nothing in mind, particularly; no plans or schemes or mischief or, beyond Katy and Sebastien, really any friends. But whatever you did was simply more your own when no one else knew you were doing it. In front of Lily, a scarp of periwinkle dusk was falling over the streets. Around her, the bars were just beginning to rouse to life. And out in the city she might find anything, anything at all, except someone who was waiting for her.

·  ·  ·

Lily was careful to stay out of the house until her usual hour. When she returned, she found Katy in the living room, watching cartoons. Lily halted at the door and considered turning around—but then she’d be out later than Beatriz expected her to be, and she didn’t want to risk that. Instead, she paused in front of the living room.

“Hey,” she said. “What are you watching?”

“I don’t know,” said Katy. Next to her sat an economics textbook with an uncapped pen as a bookmark. “It’s totally surreal. I turned it on like an hour ago and I can’t turn away. How was work?”

Lily had been anxious about seeing Katy and had expected to feel something moving gingerly between them now, but Katy sounded nonchalant.

“Fine,” said Lily. “You know.” On the screen, a talking rodent with crazed eyes was doing somersaults. “This is a weird show.”

“Yeah. It kind of makes me wonder why I ever stopped watching cartoons. I guess because I went to middle school.”

“Age is really no object.” Lily walked over to the sofa, still holding her purse. She didn’t want to leave it unattended in the house—Beatriz probably had drug-sniffing dogs in her employ. “A lot of my friends watch them all the time.”

“Like, currently?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” said Lily, sitting down. “They think it’s hilarious.”

“Our generation has such a weird thing with little-kid stuff,” said Katy after a moment.

“What do you mean?”

“Like coloring books and ironic T-shirts with dinosaurs and stuff”

“I guess. It’s premature nostalgia.”

“Do you ever feel that way, though?”

“What way?”

“Like you could go back to some time that’s passed? Like you catch
yourself thinking, why don’t I go there anymore, and why don’t I see those people and attend those parties, and then you remember it’s because that life is gone? And that you can’t?”

Lily nodded, even though she wasn’t sure she ever did feel that way, exactly. Under the regime of Maureen and Andrew, there had been no confusion about which way life was headed, or what its ultimate destination would be. Still, Lily had never heard Katy say anything like this before, and she wanted to offer something in return.

“Maybe it’s because when we’re kids we don’t really believe time only moves forward,” she said. “And then you learn it does, but you never really get your head around it.”

“You think that’s it?” said Katy.

“Yeah.” The red muskrat bopped manically on the screen. “Maybe.” It sounded like it could be true, and so maybe it was. After all, you hadn’t told a child a story until you had retold a child that story; children awoke to sentience in their lives with fables and fairy tales already familiar, and maybe this meant that the first stories they heard never felt like linear narratives at all—maybe they were more like rituals, passion plays, establishing a sense of life as recurrent and recursive, a sense that everything that happens is somehow always happening. “Like you know how when you’re a little kid you really think you live in a story?” said Lily.

“I don’t know,” said Katy doubtfully. “I don’t think so.”

“Oh, man,” said Lily. “I really, really felt that way. I totally thought I lived in a story. I was really pretty confused about it, actually. I was always thinking, here’s the part where
this
happens.”

“Where what happens?”

“Well, like.” Lily thought for a moment. “Like this time that my parents got a man to dress up as Winnie-the-Pooh and show up on the porch for my fifth birthday, for example.”

“That sounds terrifying.”

“It wasn’t, though! That’s the thing—I wasn’t terrified at all. I think I’d seen so many movies about ordinary children’s lives turning magical
that I saw it as basically my birthright.” It was true: Lily remembered it vividly. When she’d seen Pooh coming up the walkway, she’d clasped her hands together in a gesture of such hushed, old lady-ish happiness that Andrew and Maureen had laughed and taken her picture. “Who’s that?” Maureen had said, her voice suspiciously girlish, the way it always was when she was telling children lies—it was a tone that Lily had half-noticed even then, though she’d merely registered it as the voice that Maureen used when something incredibly special was happening. But what Maureen and Andrew hadn’t known—what they never had known—was that Lily was not actually surprised. She wasn’t surprised at all. In that picture, what she was thinking was: This is it. It’s finally happening. This is the part where the magic starts.

“It sounds like you’ve got really good parents,” said Katy.

“I do,” said Lily, surprising herself with the force of her sincerity. “I really, really do.”

The next day, Lily left the house at the usual time. She had promised herself she would end things with Sebastien that day, but she found she was stalling—watching the shifting trapezoids of birds against the sky, feeling a pleasantly lonesome wanderlust. The rain had left the chestnut smell of waterlogged leaves in the air. Lily was enjoying this brief purgatorial reprieve; she could afford, she figured, one more day of it. And so she rode the Subte to the end of the line and back; she stalked the parameters of the zoo, which was closed since it was a Sunday. No matter, thought Lily; after all, half the fun of a zoo was smelling it! She laughed out loud, rounded a corner, and saw a booth with a fat red pay phone at its center.