Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

When she wakes, she stands by the counter eating Jacob’s pancakes from the platter. She takes the tablets, drinks a glass of water. Sunlight pours in the windows and she leans against the counter watching the revolving motes of dust, each mote leaving a blurred trail like a comet. She goes into the bathroom, sits against the wall sucking on the thermometer, and when she checks it, her temperature is again 99.2. She puts her fist against her forehead. You’re okay, Turtle, she thinks. You’re just worn-out.

She takes her antibiotics as regularly as she is able. In the mornings, she brews herself stinging nettle tea and goes out on the porch with her tea to watch the ocean. Several days a week, Jacob arrives with paper sacks brimming with food, piled under his arms, hanging from his wrists, and Turtle, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the fireplace, hands wrapped around a cup of tea, will look up and admire him. The first time was just a day or two after their return home, and he came with news: “My parents freaked when they saw my face! You should’ve seen them! They were like, ‘Whaaaat haaaaaaappennnnned?!’ And when I told them that I was washed out to sea and you came and rescued me, my mom said, ‘It’s very dangerous to go into the surf to rescue a drowning person,’ and I said that you weren’t afraid of danger, that danger was afraid of you, and they asked where Brett was in all this, and I said he was washed out, too, only he had his Easy Cheese can, and he just triggered the nozzle and jetted away to safety.”

“So you lied,” Turtle says.

“I told Brett the whole story over the phone—he was pissed ! He was like, ‘I miss everything!’—I told him how we were washed out to sea and how it was like making furious love to a clash of orgiastic rhinos in a swimming pool filled with broken glass, and how you made a fire by staring balefully down into the reflective bottom of an aluminum can until your immense force of will was concentrated and magnified by the parabolic mirror into a white-hot spark of pure Turtle rage that could light anything on fire, even the hearts of unwary high schoolers.”

“What did he say?”

“He had to admit that it might work.”

“I wish you wouldn’t lie.”

“And then I said how you waited until the darkest part of the second night, just before the dawn, and as the moon touched the horizon, you spread your arms and commanded the seas to part, and they parted as quickly and as widely as his mom’s legs, and we walked back across the ocean floor with sea monsters basking in the pools and how they called out to you with a siren song and how you wanted to descend into the black and join them until I took your hand and led you away. It seemed almost like he didn’t believe me.”

When her back has scarred into thick pink keels, she goes shopping with Jacob’s family, slouching uncomfortably around the fronts of stores while Isobel picks out summer dresses, saying, “Oh, but you’d look so good ! Oh, but you have the perfect figure for a dress. Oh, look at this! Oh, please, please, Turtle! I’ll buy you ice cream! Anything!” and Turtle massaging her knobby fingers while Isobel appeals to Jacob, saying, “Jacob, tell her to try it on!” and Jacob putting up his hands, saying, “I have no power over her, and if I did , I wouldn’t squander it on clothes,” and Imogen saying, “I know where you’d squander it,” and Isobel saying, “Imogen!”

And later, going shop to shop, Imogen announces, “I’m taking her to Understuff. Homeslice needs a bra.”

“You’re not,” Jacob says.

“I am, too, dingus,” Imogen says.

“I am not a dingus,” Jacob says.

“Social media is gonna ban all photos of her and she won’t have any friends and then she will die alone drinking wine from a box and her hundreds of cats will close in and eat her face. That’s not what you want for her, Jacob.”

Turtle says, “What?”

In the end, Turtle stands by herself in the changing room of the lingerie store. It all feels too posh. The room is uncomfortably large and the carpet unfamiliar. The walls are hung with silks. Imogen and Isobel throw bras over the door at her and Turtle stands inside holding them and setting them on the chair while they describe, through the door, how the bra should fit. She takes off her shirt but cannot work the clasps. Her left hand is still clumsy. She is embarrassed that either of them should see her ruined back. She doesn’t like her lean, ugly face in the mirror. She has slashes for cheekbones, squinty eyes. Her long blond hair has the thick, wild texture of fur, partially dreaded. She stands stark and grimacing. Outside, she can hear Imogen and Isobel appealing to Jacob, and Jacob saying, “She’s shy , guys!” She stands in the dressing room. She holds the bra up. None of this matters, she thinks. They are preoccupied by things that do not matter, they do not see what it is and they do not see what is important. She thinks, if this is what other people have, I don’t envy it.

When Isobel finally knocks, she calls, “Just a minute!”

Alone in her ancestral home, she waits beside the fire with an oil lamp and she watches the flames, listening to the wind, imagining the blackberry canes creeping up between the floorboards to cast their green runners across her shoulders. Every day of it is good and any day could be the last, though it feels as if he might never return. It feels as if this could be her life. Each day, she puts off telling Jacob. She is aware that it is the wrong thing, and it is a selfish thing. But it has been the same wrong, selfish thing since she met the boys above the Albion. She has always known it put them in danger. She is almost comfortable, knowing what she needs to do and not doing it. She rubs olive oil into the pink wounds. Her joy is full and aimless. It accretes in layers under her skin and knits her pores tight. She sleeps folded in wool blankets in front of the fire. One night, her breasts aching and sore, she gets up and goes into the bathroom and sits there on the toilet, and she looks down to where a clue of blood unspools into the basin. She touches the pads of her fingers to her pussy and brings them up, daubed with her menarche. She puts them in her mouth and sucks them clean and then puts her fist against her forehead and cries for herself and for Martin. It is the end of something. She has been too skinny, her body has had too few resources. She hunches over her naked knees and sobs. She does not want anything to change. She wants nothing lost.

“You’re making me fat,” she tells Jacob the next day. He grins, putting the groceries in the cabinets. He is carefree. He thinks she’s joking. He thinks they will go on like this forever. He is excited to help with her college applications. He stands in the kitchen, groceries laid out across the counter, a slab of lamb bleeding on the butcher block, the Dutch oven heating on the stove, with him crushing garlic cloves with the flat of the knife, shelling them, mincing them with an easiness and a calm domestic competence utterly alien to her, a kind of miracle. He is saying, “I am in love with George Eliot! My god! Middlemarch ! That is a motherfucking book right there! Such a book—! She has a wonderful, broad, generous style; she writes the way I want my letters to Congress to sound, you know?” As she watches him, she can imagine Isobel instructing him how to do it, a glass of wine on the counter and all of them, Isobel and Jacob and Brandon and Imogen, in the kitchen cooking some meal, which Jacob is cooking for her now, and Turtle can see in the patient serenity with which he wheels around the kitchen a whole inheritance of love. When Jacob is here, with her, the desire to touch him grows, becoming a kind of need, and she lets each moment of need pass her by, sitting there next to him, cross-legged, unable to do anything but look until sheer inactivity carries her through the unendurable moment. After he leaves, she will sit watching her fire, in love with wanting and not having, and sometimes, thinking of something he’d said, she’ll grin and lie back on the blankets in front of the fire, still grinning.