Emma Rathbone: Losing It

“Do you sell them?”

“More and more,” she said. “I do series, themes, you know. Different things each time. I’m trying to get it off the ground. But for now, for my day job, I still do hospice work.”

“Oh, okay,” I said. “What’s that like?”

She shrugged. “Tiring.” She looked around. She had ramrod posture and a large forehead and a feminine, voluptuous face, but there was a shiny hardness there, too, as if there were steel rods beneath her skin.

I turned my napkin over in my lap, took a sip of wine, flicked something off the table. I glanced up at the brass chandelier and wondered about the likelihood of it crashing to the table. The seconds ticked by.

She seemed to remember I was there. She smiled brightly. “What do you think you’ll be doing here,” she said, “for the summer?”

“Well, I have to get a job. But I’m also planning on writing an essay,” I said, surprising myself, the idea having only occurred to me right then.

“Really?”

“Yes,” I said, “about swimming. About swimming culture. What it’s like. I don’t think there’s much out there — or at least I haven’t read much — about what it’s like. And I have that firsthand experience.”

“Of course,” she said. She stared thoughtfully into the distance. “I remember that period of time. Hilary always talked about that. How driven you were. She was really impressed.”

I shrugged and nodded.

“She’d talk about how you’d wake her up, drag her out of bed. You were all ready to go. You just wanted to get there. How you begged them to let you sign up at the swim team.”

“She said that?”

Viv nodded.

“That I begged them to sign up?”

“Yes.”

“But”—I shook my head—“that’s… They were the ones who wanted me to do it.”

She shrugged, chewed.

“I thought, because of Mom’s failed horse-riding career. I mean, she was the one who signed me up, you know, initially.”

I thought of my mom watching me from the bleachers at practice, biting her thumbnail, her face knitted with inner calculations. I thought of the subtle way she’d let me know if she thought I’d done a good job or not: if I could watch television in the living room when we got home, the meted-out dessert portions after dinner, the grade of affection in her voice when she said good night. Had I imagined all that? Everything tilted ominously as I considered that a huge portion of my life may have been based on a misunderstanding.

“Anyway,” I said, trying to figure out how to change the subject.

“Wasn’t there talk of you going to the Olympics?” she said.

“I went to the Olympic trials in Tallahassee,” I said.

She nodded, and I was annoyed by the way she gingerly avoided probing any further, as if it was something I was sensitive about, some huge failure that I hadn’t made it to the actual Olympics. People didn’t know. They didn’t know how good you had to be to even get to the trials. I wrenched apart a roll.

“Do you do a lot of crafts?” I said. “I noticed a few knickknacks around the house. Like that frame, in the living room?” I couldn’t tell if she’d heard me. She was methodically pulling something apart on her plate. “With the seashells on it? Or is that from— Do you travel a lot?” I said desperately.

Viv cleared her throat and looked up. “I took a class,” she said.

“Oh, okay.”

“On frame decoration.”

“I see.” I waved my fork around. “So, they said you could do pretty much whatever you wanted? With the frames?”

She glanced up at me. She straightened her shoulders. “Yes,” she said primly. She repositioned a piece of chicken with her knife and fork. I mashed a pea on my plate.

I looked up at the chandelier and said a little prayer that it actually would come crashing down.

“I did used to travel, quite a bit,” she said. “In fact, I recently went to Orlando.”

“Florida? What was that like?”

“Very lively.” She finished chewing and again dabbed the sides of her mouth. “I stayed with a friend there. A very nice apartment complex. It had balconies with”—she shaped the air with her hands—“flower boxes. And”—she continued shaping the air—“all different colors, as if to get the effect of a village. One evening a young man, he turned out to be divorced, invited us into the courtyard and we had teriyaki, all together there.”

She looked at me expectantly.

I nodded frantically. “Great,” I said. “Cool — so, he was a chef?”

“Yes,” she said. I felt as if I had disappointed her in some fundamental way. “More or less.”

“Great.”

The rest of dinner, we couldn’t find a toehold. I gave her an update about how Mom and Dad were doing. I talked blandly about my old job at Quartz. She perfunctorily told me about her duties at the hospice where she worked, talking to families and dealing with patients. I worked hard to keep her going about this, pumping her with questions, because it seemed like safe territory — work. And it distracted us from what I think she must have been feeling, too. That we’d lost whatever ease we’d had when I was a kid and she came to visit us in Texas.

Back up in my room, I poked around online for a while and then tried to read. At ten o’clock I turned off the lamp and lay there with my eyes open. A breeze came in and ruffled some of the pages of a spiral notebook on the bureau. It must have been two hours before I was finally able to drift off, listening to the shifting, digestive sounds of the house at night, and trying not to feel like I’d made a terrible mistake.

When was the last time you wanted something? Wanted it so badly that the very grip of your wanting seemed to prevent you from actually getting it because you were throwing things off with your need, holding too hard, jarring things out of joint?

The next day I sat in the sun on the front porch, wondering how I was going to do it — how I was going to lose my virginity.

Aunt Viv had left for work before I woke up and I’d explored her home and the yard. I’d found some rubber boots in a hall closet and skirted the perimeter of the land in the back, weeds and tall grass whipping against my shins. A small trail led into the woods, and I went along on it until I came to an overgrown trailer that looked like a dining car from the 1950s. I peered in the windows, which were almost fully opaque with dirt and dust, and inside saw the outline of piles of wood. I kept going on the trail until it went under a fence and I had to turn around.

Back out in the sun, I kept going until I came to a twisted-up oak tree. I sat on the roots for a little while, watching everything in its hot summer stillness, grateful to be in the shade.

I went into the barn, where there were plastic chairs, and a few tables, and a bed frame, and some old wreaths, and sharp slats of light on the floor. There were cans of paint and jars and canvases. Something big and bulky was covered in a dusty tarp. I felt a small sting on the back of my leg. I slapped it and left.

Down the long gravel driveway, at the mailbox, I looked back and forth along the street. In the distance, ivy crawled along the power lines. The day bore down. I walked back to the house, feeling heavy and disorganized with heat. I got some water and then came back out and sat on the porch.

My virginity composed about 99 percent of my thought traffic. I concentrated on it — trying to drill it down to its powder, its particle elements, trying to recategorize it, impose different narratives on why this had happened.

I knew the way it worked, too — that certain attitudes would attract certain things. I knew that if you ignored something, stepped away from it, allowed yourself to breathe, it would come to you. It was like when I worked the box office at San Antonio Stage one summer, and I had to open the wonky combination lock to the safe, and sometimes the harder I tried, the more stuck it would get. But if I gave it a moment, allowed myself to float away, I had that necessary confidence, finesse, whatever that thing is that certain dim athletes and movie stars have — that insouciance that causes all the cogs in your universe to sync, gives you easy passage. The lock would click.