Laura Kasischke - The Raising

“Well, the twins are. Boys, that is. Males.”

“Thanks for that penetrating insight,” Mira said, and began to put the costumes back in the box.

“Well, it seems to me like, I don’t know, Mira— bulls , Superman, something like that might be more appropriate for two little boys for Halloween? I mean, I’m sorry if this offends you, or it’s too burdensome to come up with something gender-appropriate. It’s not like I suggested that you sew a thousand sequins onto a handmade serpent costume or something.”

Oh, yes.

The handmade serpent costume with the thousand sequins was something Clark’s mother had made for him when he was a kid. It was something he’d told Mira about his mother when they’d first started dating, to give her a sense of the woman who’d raised him—her fanatical dedication to her son, how seriously she’d taken her role as Homemaker. (“I wore the thing once,” he’d said. “The woman would have been perfectly happy to go blind making my Halloween costume.”)

They’d been driving in the dark together, Clark at the wheel. Mira couldn’t see his face, but there was no mistaking the grief, maybe even the shame, in his voice. She’d reached across to him, taken his hand, and her own eyes had filled with tears. She’d wanted, then, completely, to love Clark with that kind of devotion herself. She wanted to be, someday, the kind of mother to his child who would sew a thousand green sequins to a felt suit simply because the child had a passing fancy for sea serpents. She would be that kind of mother, she vowed to herself then, even if, someday, it pained her children to consider those pointless sacrifices. She wanted those she loved to be that certain of her love.

Now, looking up at Clark, Mira said, “Well, I wish I had time to stay home and sew the boys’ costumes myself, but I have to pay the fucking rent. Somebody around here has to work to pay the fucking rent.”

Mira hadn’t even noticed that Clark had the newspaper in his hand until he’d thrown it at her, and it had fallen in a wrinkled rasping disorder around her, and she was grabbing it up by the fistfuls and ripping it to pieces, throwing it back at him as he headed for the door.

“Hell Week? Is this, like, hazing? You’ve got to be kidding. I mean, why would you join a ‘club’ that tortured you for a week?”

“It helps you bond,” Nicole said, and Craig choked a little on his milkshake. The way she said it was so sweet, so utterly naïve. “It makes it so you’re really sisters,” she went on.

“Nicole, I thought you already did this during ‘Challenge’ Month. I mean, if having to wear the same pair of panties for four weeks didn’t cement your bond, what good will Hell Week do?”

“Come on, Craig. You promised not to joke about that.”

He nodded. He had. He’d promised up and down as a way of getting her to tell him what she was so self-conscious about in November. He’d assumed she was planning on dumping him, since every time he kissed her she found some reason to squirm away, and even in the cafeteria she sat as far from him as you could get and still be technically eating a meal with someone. He’d showed up outside the Omega Theta Tau house after one of her “secret meetings” on a Tuesday night, holding a bouquet of red roses, and she’d burst into tears and started to run away from him. By the time he finally caught up with her, half a block away, he was crying, too. He grabbed her arm, but she yanked it away and she started to beg, “Please, please , just stay away from me for a few more days.”

“Why? Nicole, I love you. What’s wrong?”

She ran a little farther, but weakly, seeming to be losing her will to run from him, until he managed to pull her into an alleyway between a liquor store and a sushi place. By this time, he’d already tossed the roses onto a park bench. He grabbed her arms in both of his and pulled her to him, and she sobbed, but she also went limp when he wouldn’t let go, and he muttered into her hair, “Please. Nicole. I’m dying here. I love you. Just tell me.”

“You’ll hate me,” she said. She sobbed. “You’ll think I’m so stupid. You’ll think I’m so, so—gross. You’ll laugh at me, or you’ll tell people. You’ll—”

“Don’t tell me what I’ll do, Nicole! There’s nothing that would make me hate you. And I’d never betray you. You’re the most precious, the most—”

“Okay! Okay! My underpants!” she shouted. Some guy walking by the alley did a double-take then, and Nicole cringed, buried her head in her hands, and said it again in a ragged whisper. “My underpants .” And again. “My underpants .”

“What?” A slideshow of brief, crazy images flashed through his mind. He saw a football team throwing Nicole’s panties around on a field, panties flown from a flagpole, panties for sale on eBay, photographs of panties tacked to bulletin boards, and then she said, “They’re dirty . You’ll just tell me how stupid I am.”

It took a long time in the alley, and a lot of tears soaked into his corduroy jacket, to get the story out. She had three more days to wear them. On Saturday she had to hand over the filthy things to the Omega Theta Tau president in some sort of ritual celebration of sisterhood. Then she could wear new ones.

Nicole sobbed, “I can smell them .”

It was hard not to laugh, but even harder not to lecture:

“This is absurd, Nicole. You’re not joining the armed forces here. You shouldn’t have to do this kind of shit just to live in a big house with a bunch of prom queens.”

“I knew you’d—!”

“Okay, okay,” Craig said, and closed his mouth by pressing his lips to her forehead.

That was back in November. Now, the first week of March, she was informing him that for Hell Week she wasn’t going to be able to leave the basement of the Omega Theta Tau house except to attend classes.

“What the hell—no pun intended—are you going to be doing down there?”

“They don’t tell you. But the girls from last year said it was mostly different projects. Stuff for events. And tests on Pan-Hellenic things, facts. The Founders.” She shrugged.

“That’s total, unadulterated bullshit,” Craig said. “Why would you need to be in the basement?”

“It’s a trial.” Nicole lifted her chin, and he could see that it was quivering. “It’s a tradition.” She lifted a shoulder, let it fall. “I actually think it sounds fun.”

“Fun?”

“You’re not in a fraternity, Craig. I don’t think you can relate to… to…”

“You got that right,” Craig said. The waitress came over to their table then and started to take Nicole’s plate away even though she’d never touched her grilled cheese. Craig put his hand out and waved the waitress away. “She’s still eating that,” he said.

“I’m so sorry,” the waitress said without a shred of sarcasm, and held her hands up as if he’d tried to slap her. She was one of those infuriating middle-aged Midwestern women who used her friendliness like a weapon. Already she’d complimented everything about the two of them before she’d bothered to take their orders—I love your coat, I love your sweater, I love your hair thing, I love your ring, I love your boots. Craig had stared at the menu, imagining his mother shooing this woman away: Thanks, we love you, too…

But Nicole engaged the waitress exuberantly, told her that the sweater was from the Gap, that Craig’s coat was from the Salvation Army (!), that the hair thing was just a scrunchie of her sister’s, that the boots were Uggs, and the ring—Craig had given her the ring.