Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

Lotto was floating. Someone had put En Vogue on the CD player, ironically, for sure, but he loved those girls’ voices. The apartment was hot as hell, the late-afternoon sun shining in like a voyeur. Nothing mattered: all his college friends were together again. He took a moment to watch, standing with a beer in the doorway.

Natalie was doing a keg stand, held up by the ankles by the guys from the coffee shop down the block, her shirt lapping over her mealy belly. Samuel, blue bags under his eyes, was talking loudly about having worked ninety hours at his investment bank last week. Beautiful Susannah was putting her face in the freezer to cool it off, radiant with the shampoo commercial she’d landed. He swallowed his envy. The girl couldn’t act, but she was dewy, doelike. They’d hooked up once junior year. She’d tasted like fresh cream. His co-captain on the crew team, Arnie, flush from mixology school, was shaking up Pink Squirrels, his skin streaked apricot from tanning lotion.

Behind him, a voice Lotto didn’t know said, “What’s the one forbidden word in a riddle about chess?”

And some other person paused, then said, “Chess?”

And the first person said, “You remember our freshman Borges seminar!” and Lotto laughed out loud with love for these pretentious sperm wads.

They would have this party year after year, he decided. It would be their annual June fête, the friends gathering, building until they had to rent out an airplane hangar to hold everyone, to drink and shout and dance into the night. Paper lanterns, shrimp boil, someone’s kid’s bluegrass band. When your family dismisses you, like Lotto’s did, you create your own family. This crowded and sweaty lurch was all he wanted of life; this was the summit. Jeez, he was happy.

What’s this? A spray of wet coming through the open garden windows, the old lady screaming down at them with the hose trained into the roil, her voice barely audible over the music and shouting. The girls shrieked, their summer dresses clinging to their beautiful skin. Tender. Moist. He could eat them all. He had a vision of himself in a pile of limbs and breasts, a red mouth open, sliding over his — but oh, that’s right, he couldn’t. He was married. He grinned at his wife, who was hurrying across the floor to the fat woman screaming down through the window, “Savages! Control yourselves! Keep the noise down! Savages!”

Mathilde spoke mollifyingly, and the cranks were turned and the garden windows shut, and those to the street thrust open, which was cooler anyway, being in the shade. Already, the lip-locks, the grinding, though the sun still shined in. They turned the noise up a notch, the voices louder.

“… cusp of a revolution. East and West Germany reunifying, there’s going to be a huge backlash to capitalism.”

“Hélène Cixous is sexy. Simone de Beauvoir. Susan Sontag.”

“Feminazis, ipso facto, cannot be sexy.”

“… like, the fundamental human condition to be lonely.”

“Cynic! Only you would say that in the middle of an orgy.”

Lotto’s heart kicked froglike in his chest; sweeping toward him in her brilliant blue skirt, Mathilde. His azure lion rampant. Her long hair plaited down her left breast, she, the nexus of all the good of this world. He was reaching toward her when she shifted him over to the front door. It was open. A very small person stood there. Surprise! His baby sister Rachel in pigtails and overalls, gazing at the scene of drink and grind and cigarette with baby Baptist horror, shaking with nerves. She was only eight years old. She had an unaccompanied-minor tag hanging around her neck. There was a middle-aged couple with matching hiking boots frowning into the room behind her.

“Rachel!” he shouted, and picked her up by the loop of her backpack and carried her in. The friends shuffled away. Kissing ceased, in this room at least; there was no telling what was happening in the bedroom. Mathilde unhooked Rachel. They had met only once before, when Lotto’s aunt had brought the girl up for graduation a few weeks earlier. Rachel now touched the emerald necklace that Mathilde had impulsively given her from her own neck at that dinner. “What are you doing here?” Lotto and Mathilde shouted over the noise.

Rachel shied a little away from Mathilde, who had a reek to her. Antiperspirant, Mathilde said, gave you Alzheimer’s; perfume gave her hives. There were tears in Rachel’s eyes when she said, “Lotto? You invited me?”

She said nothing about waiting in the airport for three hours or the kind but stern hikers who’d seen her weeping and offered her a ride. And Lotto remembered at last that she was supposed to come, and the day dimmed because he’d forgotten his baby sister was visiting for the weekend, forgotten it as soon as he’d agreed to it on the phone with his aunt Sallie, hadn’t even made it to the other room to tell Mathilde before it slipped his mind. A wave of shame rose in his chest and he imagined his sister’s fear, her distress, as she waited alone for him at baggage claim. Oh, jeepers. What if some bad man had gotten hold of her. What if she’d trusted someone terrible, not these homely people by the keg with their bandannas and carabiners, laughing because they remembered the wild parties of their youth. What if she’d trusted a perv. Flashes of white slavery, Rachel scrubbing a kitchen floor on her knees, kept in a box under someone’s bed. She looked as if she’d been crying, her little eyes red. It must have been terrifying to ride all the way from the airport with strangers. He hoped she wouldn’t tell Muvva, that his mother wouldn’t be even more disappointed in him than she already was. The things she’d said to him just after they’d eloped were molten in him still. He was such a codpiece.

But Rachel was hugging him fiercely around the waist. The storm on Mathilde’s face had also cleared. He didn’t deserve these women who surrounded him, who made things right. [Perhaps not.] A whispered conference, and it was decided: the party could go on in their absence but they’d take Rachel out to the diner on the corner for dinner. They’d get her to bed and lock the bedroom door by nine and turn the music down; they’d make their breach up to her all weekend. Brunch, a movie and popcorn, a trip to FAO Schwarz to dance on the floor piano.

Rachel put her things in the closet with the camping stuff and raincoats in it. When she turned, she was immediately accosted by a short dark man — Samuel? — who looked profoundly tired, who was talking about his extremely important job in a bank or something. As if it’s so hard to cash checks and make change. Rachel could do it herself, and she was only in third grade.

She stole away and slipped an envelope with her housewarming gift in it into her brother’s back pocket. She savored the thought of his face when he opened it: six months of her allowance saved up, nearly two thousand dollars. It was an insane allowance for an eight-year-old. What did she have to spend it on? Muvva would freak, but Rachel had burned for poor Lotto and Mathilde, she couldn’t believe they’d been cut off when they were married. As if money would ever have stopped them: Mathilde and Lotto had been born to nestle into each other like spoons in a drawer. Also, they needed the cash. Look at this tiny dark hole with no furniture to speak of. She’d never seen a place so bare. They didn’t even have a television, they didn’t even have a kettle or a rug. They were impoverished . She stole back again between Mathilde and her big brother, her nose against Lotto because he smelled like warm lotion and, well, Mathilde smelled like the high school wrestling room where her Girl Scout troop met. Hard to breathe. At last, the fear that had overwhelmed Rachel in the airport fell away, overpowered by a wash of love. The people here were so sexy, so drunk. She was shocked at all the fuck s and shit s falling out of their mouths: Antoinette had seared into her children that cusses were for the verbally moronic. Lotto would never swear; he and Mathilde were the right kind of adult. She would be like them, living morally, cleanly, living in love. She looked out at the swirl of bodies in the late sun, in the June stifle of the apartment, the booze and music. All she wanted in life was this: beauty, friendship, happiness.