Emma Rathbone - Losing It

“I know it doesn’t look like much,” she said. “But this was one of your grandfather’s most treasured possessions.”

“Is it some Civil War kind of deal?” I said.

“No, it’s Orville Wright’s handkerchief.”

“Whoa, cool,” I said, genuinely impressed. “As in the Wright brothers?”

“Yes, and if you look here”—she indicated a streak in the rag—“that’s supposed to be grease from the first airplane that ever lifted off the ground.”

“No kidding,” I said.

“Can you imagine?” she said, staring into the distance, her face animated and full of make-believe. “Your grandfather, before he sold his business, he owned a few automotive-repair shops. There was one in Kitty Hawk, and he became friends with them through that. He knew them before they were famous, before they were the ‘Wright Brothers.’”

“I wonder why Dad never told me any of this,” I said.

Viv winced a little, shook her head.

“There!” I pointed to initials embroidered into the cloth, “O.W.”

Viv nodded and smiled, pleased.

“You know, there’s something of her in you.”

I looked up; she was staring at me. “Ellen,” she continued. “My sister. There’s a resemblance. It’s in the way you tilt your head.”

“Really?”

Viv nodded again.

We were quiet for a few moments. It had stopped belting rain; now there was just a steady rolling downpour.

She smiled sadly, and looked around.

“This was her old room.” She pointed to a corner. “That’s where her dresser used to be. A big old white-painted thing.”

There was some legroom in the moment, in the air, that I almost thought I could blurt it out: Why are you a virgin? And something about the momentary terms between us would mean she had to tell me the truth.

“So it was a car crash?” I said instead. “The way Ellen died.”

“Yes,” said Viv. “Just one of those senseless things.”

She put the wrapped-up frame back in the drawer.

Something of Viv’s childhood came to me then — the hot fields, a father at a sleepy automotive shop, the long afternoons buckling under a sense of grief.

“She’d had a puppy,” said Viv. “A little Scottish terrier named Sandy, who she adored.” Viv was playing with a scrap of fabric. “I was visiting you all and we were at the beach once — you were there — at South Padre Island, and I saw a little black terrier, just like Sandy — it could have been her — playing around in the sand. I watched her for a while, and then I watched her run into the water, playing in the waves. I didn’t see anyone looking out for her, and I was the only one who saw when the riptide began to pull her away.

“I went in after her,” said Viv. “In all my clothes. You know how heavy clothes get when they’re wet.”

“Wait, what?” I said. I’d been watching the flickering candle, my mind wandering. “You went in after who?”

“The dog,” said Viv. “The Scottish terrier. I’d heard about the riptide on the radio that morning. There were orange flags up, to caution people, but of course no one paid attention.”

“You just ran into the water? In your clothes?”

“Someone had to. The owner wasn’t watching. The dog was getting pulled away. I was the only one who saw it, saw what was happening. It seemed to happen so slowly, and then so quickly. The way the dog was suddenly in trouble.”

I remembered that moment with her now: the time-share. The sense of trouble in the air. Something to do with Aunt Viv.

“What happened?” I said.

“Well, it was a big ordeal,” said Viv. “A lifeguard had to save us both.” She laughed. “My shoes and skirt — I was wearing sneakers for some reason, they were so heavy in the water. I think I overestimated what I would be able to do, and I got swept away by the current, too. Your parents weren’t happy. Well, they were confused, mostly, I think.”

“What happened to the dog?”

“He was saved. A little girl claimed him, I heard. I never met her.”

“Sheesh,” I said, after a moment.

Later I tried to picture it: a bright day, her skirt billowing around her in the water. I could feel how it would be, with the waves and world wheeling around you, your clothes and shoes dragging you down as you fought the sea. Would most people have done that? Was she insane? I couldn’t decide. It had sounded so logical, the way she put it. But who would go fully dressed into the ocean after a stranger’s dog? It occurred to me that Viv might be one of those slightly unhinged people who, if she’d been born in a different era, or was present at a certain joint of history, might have distinguished herself as a warrior queen, someone capable of displaying unwieldy bouts of bravery at the right time. The light flickered against her face. For a moment, outside of everything, I felt a belt of affection for her, and for her strong, crazy stripe of honor. She played with the edge of her shirt, lost in thought.

We got up and put away the walking sticks, then went back downstairs and made dinner out of leftovers in the fridge. The lights came on, but only much later, in our sleep.

The next morning I e-mailed Jack. I tried not to get too hung up on the wording or the tone, because I knew I would never send it if I did. I composed what I told myself was a breezy message and pressed Send.

I looked out at the bright trees. The sun was beating down on the back garden, the hydrangeas already hanging their puffy heads.

Jack. Jack Picknell. It didn’t seem like the right last name for him. Picknell implied something sterile to me, pettily bureaucratic and tucked in. And he was all craggy warmth, blades of light slicing out.

Here was my opportunity to lose my virginity in a situation where I actually wanted to, where I wasn’t forcing it, the noose of time tightening around my neck. Here was something where the normal wheels of attraction, so ever present with other people, were there for me, turning the proper way. It could be a simple, unassailable, all-American summer fling. Maybe that’s what I would say to my daughter fifteen years from now. “It was a summer fling.” I’d leave out the part about us meeting at a funeral and me being twenty-six. But the whole situation with Jack had the possibility of reframing my plight — I just lost my virginity to some guy I met one summer, like the kind of person for whom things fell into place like that, one fortuitous event hooking onto another until I was wearing a big floppy sweater and staring out at the waves before having understanding sex with my husband and reflecting on our lives that were ladled with the perfect amount of happiness and well-proportioned, surmountable problems.

If he would just write me back.

I tried to get on with the rest of my morning. That afternoon I sat in the arctic cool of the office, in my swivel chair, waiting and checking my e-mail, and the day continued like a can being slowly wrenched open.

Jeannette came by at one point, swishing up to my desk in one of her beachy, floral numbers, her gray hair blow-dried into its usual apotheosis, and told me a story about how she’d contracted her son-in-law to repaint their kitchen, but he’d made a real cock-up of it, her words, and spilled paint all over the marble countertops. “A little dab’ll do ya!” she said, cracking herself up.

This was just the kind of conversation I would normally try to draw out with her to prevent me from having to work on whatever assignment I’d been given. Jeannette had been there for decades, and so her seniority, in combination with her salty personality, made her pretty much unassailable in that office and no one ever messed with her or, by extension, the person she was talking to.