Looks Page 3

  Bill had had the bookshelves built into his study when he first moved in with them, back when Aimee was nine years old. She already liked him so much better than she had liked Ron or Peter or Frank or Jerry—boyfriends number one through four—that she had volunteered to help Bill unpack his twenty boxes of books and load them into the shelves the day after he moved in. The shelves were brand-new then, painted a glossy, optimistic white. “Just stick ’em in any old which way,” Bill told her, handing her a short stack of novels. “I like my study to look like a dusty old bookshop you find by accident in some alley in London and then can never find again.”

  Out of the boxes came books of all kinds, leather-bound books and paperbacks, books with old-fashioned pictures on the covers and books with strange German titles, novels and how-to manuals, a whole box of textbooks and anthologies that he used in his Great Works of Modern Literature classes at the university. Aimee and Bill worked faster and faster, shoving books into the shelves in toppling heaps, until they got to the last few boxes, marked POETRY in big black Sharpie letters.

  “Hands off!” Bill called out when Aimee reached for one of the last boxes. “Let me deal with those. I have a special way I do my poetry books.”

  So Aimee sat cross-legged on the brown shag carpet and watched as Bill opened his boxes of poetry, carefully peeling the packing tape off instead of gouging into it with his keys like he’d done with all the others, spreading apart the cardboard flaps of the box top with the attention and care of a priest saying Mass, then reaching in with both hands and lifting out each thin book, examining it, turning it over in his hands, laying it down flat on his desk before turning back for another. Finally he held something up for Aimee to see. It was a small, square volume, beat up and falling apart, encased in a Ziploc bag like a scientific specimen. The title, in big black letters on the cover, was Howl.

  “You see this, Ame?” Bill asked her, dangling the book by the corner of its Ziploc in front of her upturned face. “This is a first edition of one of the greatest pieces of literature composed in the twentieth century. You ever heard of Allen Ginsberg?”

  Aimee shook her head.

  “You’re telling me you’re nine years old and you never heard of Allen Ginsberg, the greatest American poet-prophet since Walt Whitman? What has your mother been reading you, man, Dr. Seuss?”

  Aimee blushed—only the night before she had reread One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish to herself in bed. Sometimes she liked to reread her baby books at night—for comfort, not because she liked them or anything.

  “Never heard of Ginsberg—that’s child abuse, man,” Bill said, shaking his head. “Well prepare to have your mind blown, okay? Are you ready to have your mind blown, Ame?”

  Aimee nodded, openmouthed.

  Bill opened the Ziploc bag and slid the battered book out onto his open palm. Gently, gently, he opened the book’s cover, flipped a couple of pages in, and then read aloud in the smoky, drawling voice that Aimee would come to know as his Poetry Voice.

  “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,” Bill read, his voice thick with emotion. As he rumbled and breathed his way through the poem’s first page the words fell down in glittering spirals around Aimee’s ears, strange and beautiful as Christmas garlands: “angelheaded” and “illuminated” and “hallucinating” and “benzedrine” . . . After a minute of reading, Bill paused and looked up into Aimee’s eyes. Unbelievably, he seemed to be about to cry. “Can you dig it, Ame?” he asked, hushed. “Can you dig it?”

  Aimee had no idea what she had just heard. She had no idea what “dig it” meant. “Yes,” she said. “I can dig it, Bill.”

  “Of course you can. You’re so down, little Ame. You are one smart little ankle-biter.” Bill put his big hand on Aimee’s head then and squeezed her skull, making a smile pop out on her face. It thrilled her to the bottoms of her bare nine-year-old feet.

  “Okay, man, this one goes on top of the henchmen where nothing can hurt it.” Bill slid the first edition of Howl back into its bag and placed it on top of the filing cabinet for safekeeping. “Now help me put the rest of these in alphabetical order.”

  Lately Aimee’s so over Ginsberg. This past summer, while things were going seriously downhill between Bill and her mom, she started arguing with him about Ginsberg at least once a day, trying to get him to see how annoying the Beats can be sometimes, how over-the-top and hysterical and embarrassing. But even when they were in the middle of some knock-down drag-out, even when Bill was yelling at Aimee that she was an ignorant philistine who didn’t deserve to be allowed to read if this was how she was going to treat a saint like Allen Ginsberg, even then Aimee loved to be in this room with him. She loved standing near Bill’s poetry books. She loved the pattern their colors made on the shelves, the sweet silent song of authors’ names that the spines sang as she trailed her fingers over them again and again, the same lyrics every time: Ashbery. Auden. Baraka. Bishop. Bukowski. Burroughs . . . Turn the corner . . . Cummings. Dickinson. Eliot. Ginsberg. H.D. Hacker. Hass . . . Cross in front of the window . . . Kerouac. Kumin. Levertov. Lowell. Millay. Moore. O’Hara. Plath . . . And the final stretch: Pound. Sexton. Simic. Stein. Stevens. Whitman. Williams.

  Aimee walks slowly around the empty study now, following the pattern in her mind, running her fingertips over imaginary bindings, humming silently along to the song of imaginary names.

  Somewhere between where Rabelais and Roethke used to be, Aimee spots a pair of abandoned books at floor level, facedown on one of the lowermost shelves. A curl of hope unfolds in her chest—she imagines the phone call: “Hey, Bill, guess what I found? What if I drop by sometime and return them?” But even as she’s reaching for them she can tell by their fat paperback spines, their glossy pink and purple covers, that these books never really belonged to Bill. He left them here not by accident but by design.

  When she turns them over in her lap she sees she was right: The Intimacy Workbook for Men is the first book; Save Your Marriage, Save Your Life is the second. Not exactly Great Works of Modern Literature. And although she hears a voice in her head warning don’t—don’t—don’t, Aimee opens Save Your Marriage to a random page and reads.

  DOES YOUR PARTNER UNDERSTAND YOU? reads the heading at the top of the page.

  Mutual Understanding is the bedrock of a solid relationship. In order for Reciprocal Love to flourish, each Partner needs to feel as if the other Partner knows how their mind works, cares about what’s important to them, and accepts their quirks and foibles with a sense of humor. But Mutual Understanding doesn’t just happen through magic—it takes work. Do the following exercise to find out how much Mutual Understanding you and your Partner apply to the growth of your Reciprocal Love.

  Then a list of questions:

  1. Do you understand your Partner better now than you did when you first met, or is your Partner as much a mystery to you as ever?

  A blank line follows the question, to be filled in by the guy whose wife or girlfriend has forced him to slog through this book. Bill’s handwriting is a cryptic mix of vertical and horizontal lines punctuated by sudden loops and slashes that bear no resemblance to letters; a short spool of this tangled scrawl unravels along the blank line after question 1:

  As much a mystery as ever, Aimee thinks it says.

  2. When you talk about things that are important to you but that you know aren’t among your Partner’s Primary Interests, does your Partner make you feel heard and listened to?

  Not really, says the knot of ink on the line after question 2.

  3. Do you make an effort to understand and appreciate your Partner’s Primary Interests, even those you don’t share?

  The snarl of letters is longer here; Aimee stares at it until it smoothes out into words: I would, if she had any “Primary Interests” of her own.

  A spot of blankness opens up in the center of Aimee’s chest when she reads this, a little stain of nothingness. For a second she thin
ks she might get angry at Bill for writing something harsh like that about her mom, but then she pictures her mother’s anxious face pleading with her from across the kitchen table to please just eat, please just sleep, please just be healthy, be normal, be okay. And Aimee thinks, no, Bill’s totally right. My mother’s only “Primary Interest” is making her life—our life—look presentable to the outside world. She doesn’t care about heartbreak or pain—she’ll do anything to get rid of pain: deny it, hide it, dress it up, ignore it. She doesn’t care about the dark, ugly parts of people that make them suffer, and make them different from everyone else, and turn them into poets.

  No wonder Bill had to get out of here.

  From downstairs Aimee hears the faraway clink of dishes and silverware, her mother dutifully making the dinner Aimee won’t eat. On the floor behind the door Bill’s phone sits nestled in the carpet, its cord looped behind it like a tail.

  “Yes?” is the first thing Bill says when he answers. His voice is almost unrecognizable to Aimee; it’s steely and smooth, like a bank vault door—she’s never heard him sound like this before. “What is it, Kath?” he asks sternly. Oh God—Bill thinks she’s her mother. Freaking caller ID.

  “Um. It’s Aimee,” says Aimee.

  “Aimee.” Bill pauses. Then, concerned: “Aimee. Is something wrong? Did something happen over there?”

  Aimee says, “Um, no.”

  “Do you need something?”

  “No.”

  “Everything’s fine?”

  “Yeah. We’re totally fine over here.”

  “Well okay.” Bill pauses again, lets out a breath, and the next time he speaks he’s his loose, double-jointed self. “So okay, so what’s up, Ame? Just called to say hi?”

  “Well I, yeah, I wanted to tell you about something.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Today there was this—” Aimee starts, stops. “At school today I saw this thing—”

  “Oh hey, that’s right,” Bill interrupts. “Today was your first day in the bigs. How’d it go?”

  “Well there was this horrible thing that I saw.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “There was this, right when I got there, because I got there late because Mom had a thing with the Toyota, and right when I got there everybody was like running to homeroom and I saw these guys—like five or six guys, kind of like, chase this one girl down the hall.”

  Bill makes a huffing sound of disgust.

  “What, like, chase her chase her?”

  “Well, they were like, it was weird because it was all kind of slow. But they were—they were like saying stuff to her. Like I can’t even tell you the things they were saying.”

  “Man. On the first day of school?”

  “I know, right? I thought it was so, like I couldn’t believe no one was making them stop.”

  “Nice to know you’re safe in the Groves of Academe.”

  “Well yeah. But I think it was because, um. I think it was because she was like—” Aimee feels guilty even thinking the word. “She was like really, really. Fat.”

  Bill takes a second to think.

  “Uh-hunh.”

  “Like, she was so fat, Bill.”

  “Uh-hunh.”

  “She like, she couldn’t have walked through this door.” Aimee looks up at the door to the study from her vantage point flat on the brown shaggy floor. “She’d have to turn sideways if she wanted to fit through this door.”

  “Wow. That must be really hard for her.”

  “Yeah, I bet.”

  Now that she’s actually telling it, Aimee wants to describe exactly what she saw this morning, to make Bill see in his mind’s eye how the girl’s arms were as big around as thighs, how her hips were as wide across as a sofa, how she moved so slowly down the hall, like the float in her own torture parade, and how her whole upholstered, overstuffed body quaked with every step she took—

  There’s a faint buzzing noise on Bill’s end of the line.

  “Oh, hey, Ame? That’s my doorbell, sorry.”

  “Do you have to get it?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “You have company?”

  Bill breathes.

  “No, it’s just, it’s the pizza I ordered. But listen, why don’t you call me back later.”

  “Like at ten?”

  “Well actually, why don’t you call me another night.”

  “Like tomorrow?”

  “Well I teach tomorrow. How about Thursday?”

  “Um. Sure.”

  There’s a pause.

  “Write it down, Ame. Whatever you’re seeing, write it down just like you see it, and then, I don’t know, join the Poetry Club or something.”

  “There’s no Poetry Club at Valley Regional High.”

  “Well then start one.”

  Aimee sighs.

  “Poetry Club is for geeks.”

  Bill laughs his low, smoky laugh.

  “Man, you slay me. You slay me, man. Take that back or I’ll recite Ginsberg at you.”

  “You don’t even understand how dumb this school is, Bill. This morning on morning announcements they said they’re going to read a great American poem every day and then they go to read the first one and their idea of a great American poem is ‘The Road Not—’”

  The buzzer in Bill’s apartment sounds again, longer.

  “Sorry, Ame, hear that? I gotta run, sorry. You be strong, though, okay?”

  “Okay,” says Aimee.

  And Bill hangs up.

  Aimee puts the phone down and lies still for a moment. At the edge of her hearing a sizzling sound starts, like the distant whine of cicadas. She gets flashes, quick vivid images, of all the foods she ate today, every single bite of every single item. She can see, like she’s zooming down through the lens of an electron microscope, into the inner structure of each food, the ingredients and then the cells of the ingredients and then the proteins in the cells and then the molecules in the proteins that made up each thing she put in her mouth today. Rapidly she examines the vibrating molecular structures for fractures or tumors, anything that could be triggering an allergic reaction in her body, knocking against one white blood cell and causing a chain reaction, summoning other white blood cells from every corner of her body, all of them rushing like emergency personnel to the scene of the crime, globbing up into a goopy, translucent ball around the offending molecule and making her whole body heave and writhe, blinding her and deafening her in a flood of metallic pain—is it gonna happen? Is it gonna happen?

  Breathless, she staggers to her feet too fast—the gears and tendons grind and snap in her knees—and throws open the study door, gulping for air.

  Her mother is hovering there in the hallway, a bathrobed ghost. As suddenly as it began, the simmering pre-reaction stops.

  “I was just going to—were you calling someone?” her mother asks.

  “It was Bill,” Aimee says, too tired to lie.

  “Oh sweetie,” her mother sighs.

  “So okay, good night,” says Aimee.

  “‘Good night’? Sweetheart, it’s seven o’clock. Aren’t you gonna come have dinner with me?”

  “I can’t eat right now. I feel like I’m about to react to something,” Aimee says. “Sorry.”

  She walks past her mother into her room and bumps the door shut behind her.

  On the floor of her room, folded up on herself like a paper crane, Aimee opens her poetry notebook and tries to write it down just like she saw it. She writes hips like a sofa and hands like hams and eyes like a dead fish’s eyes. Then she turns the page of her notebook to a blank sheet and writes

  she is the garbage girl

  everything she has ever eaten

  is rotting inside her

  Then Aimee snaps her notebook shut with a cardboard clap and climbs into bed.

  3

  Who is Aimee Zorn?

  7:15 A.M. on the first day of the second week of school, and Meghan is taking a working vacation. Every
day since the first day of school she’s been back in the nurse’s office, different periods every day, trying to run into her again, but Aimee Zorn hasn’t shown up once. So now Meghan has to take matters into her own hands.

  She’s in place in front of the school, on a bench by the bus ramp, hunched over, pretending to eat breakfast. Okay, actually eating breakfast: frosted blueberry Pop-Tart. Bangs down, eyes up, watching. Bus 5 pulls up—no Aimee Zorn. Bus 8 pulls up—no Aimee Zorn. Bus 7, Bus 3, Bus 11, Bus 9—all Aimeeless. Bus 12 lumbers around the corner, a yellow submarine sloshing full of kids. Out they tumble, onto the pavement and up the wide walk in twos, threes, ones.

  There.

  Arms folded across her chest, too-light backpack flapping loose against her back, floppy hat (this one crimson) low on her head, straight black skirt down to her ankles, combat boots. Leaning forward as she walks, like she’s pushing against a fierce wind. Even from twenty yards away Meghan can see the tough, no-bullshit set to her jaw, the queasy grayish tinge to her skin.

  Bus 12 goes right by her house—it’s the bus Meghan herself would take, if she took a bus instead of getting dropped off every day. It picks up mostly west of town: a few scattered farmhouses out in the hills, a couple of cul-de-sacs of split-levels in the middle of some cornfields, that one condo development—Riverglade Estates—on the banks of the trickly little Thorn River. Meghan’s guessing Riverglade, something tells her that’s right, but it won’t be hard to find out for sure.

  Who is Aimee Zorn?

  7:35 and Meghan is not in homeroom. Meghan is in Music Practice Room D, the acoustic-paneled, all-but-abandoned cubbyhole off the art hall with the out-of-tune piano and the tricksy lock. The door can be opened without a key by giving it a kind of secret handshake—two sharp yanks on the wobbly knob—but only Meghan knows this; it’s her place and hers alone. She is standing in the middle of the darkened room now, turning a slow circle. Practicing formless-ness, practicing blurring.