Lynn Strong - Hold Still

She knew Ellie was at a party. She had an address, on Fourth Street and Eighth Avenue (Dylan’s, she’d learn later; both his parents traveled for work, and he was, like Ellie’s dad, an only child; he often had the house all to himself), not far from where they lived. She thought she’d have to knock, but had no real plan for what she’d say or do when someone answered. Except, when she came up to the door it was ajar and she could hear people talking and the thrum of music knocked her brain against her skull. She walked in still not knowing what she’d do. She expected to see him, maybe find him in some back room with her daughter. She steeled herself for the possibility of catching her daughter fucking someone while a party raged outside the door. It didn’t take long to find Ellie, though, and she wasn’t fucking anyone. At least not right then. And Dylan was quiet, the only one in the room who didn’t seem to be enjoying himself. Maya stood in the hall looking into a great room and watched her daughter. There was nothing preventing someone walking past and seeing her, this middle-aged woman — hair tied in a knot, bare-faced, in jeans and a fraying Harvard sweatshirt — snooping on these kids. But she stayed still because she had to. Once she saw her daughter, she didn’t care who found her there.

Ellie was drunk, something worse than drunk. She was in her underwear, beige and laceless, simple, something Maya had probably bought on sale. There were two other girls who stood with Ellie, but it was clear, based on their posture, based on the shock of her daughter’s beauty laid out so bare before her: Ellie was in charge. When it came to the commodity of beauty, her daughter was so rich with it she could parse it out to anyone who chose to look. Maya watched the other girls, confined by the need to be self-conscious. They shaped their faces and twisted and turned in ways they hoped might complement their best attributes. But there was no part of Ellie not worth showing off. And Maya wished for the millionth time that her daughter might be slightly less attractive. The eyes, the hair, the way the legs shone as Ellie dipped down to the floor — it was a dangerous commodity to bestow on anyone so reckless and so young.

There were a handful of boys, some men, around the girls. Music played and the girls danced and the men watched them. Dylan sat back on the couch close to the kitchen and sulked as Ellie held court.

Maya’s daughter’s hips jutted out from underneath the satin string that connected the front and back stretch of fabric that still covered her. She stood up on her toes and dipped down nearly to the floor. She walked over to one of the other girls and placed both hands on her shoulders. She came in very close to her and their breasts touched and Maya held her breath. Ellie took one hand off the girl and ran her fingers down the length of her, lingering once at her breasts and then her belly button, dipping her body farther and farther down. She bent her head back once she reached the girl’s knees, her hands wrapped around the girl’s thin hips. Maya took her eyes briefly from her daughter and watched the men around her. Their eyes stayed wide and rapt. They were quiet, sipping beers and smoking but hardly moving otherwise, as Maya’s daughter dipped and twirled.

“I’m sorry,” Joseph says after, though the whole time he was careful, kind. He’s the smallest, skinniest boy she’s ever fucked.

“I just.” She wants to ask him quietly to please not touch her. She wants to be outside again, sitting a few feet away with her arms across her chest, talking about his student loans.

Maya drives up to campus, which she rarely does. She loves the subway but does not feel up for all that interacting and is grateful instead for the hour she spends in the car. Over the bridge, the water, she watches a tugboat slip underneath as the traffic inches toward the FDR.

The building’s empty when she gets there. It’s classic university brick with tall windows on every floor. Out front is a small lawn where, in summer, kids throw Frisbees, and some of the more intrepid girls lie out in swimsuits. Now the lawn is covered in a small film of snow, and the three trees that cover it almost completely in swaths of shade in spring and summer are all bare empty branches that look sharp to Maya and too thin to hold the wealth of leaves she knows will return soon. There’s a café on the bottom floor that’s not yet open. A small man with a perfectly trimmed mustache mops the tile, with the silver metal chairs propped on the matching silver tabletops. He smiles at Maya and nods as she walks past and up the three flights of stairs to her department office. There are papers and books— Mrs. Dalloway , Lydia Davis, a collection of Keats’s poems, Barbara Johnson’s A World of Difference , and an old copy of Being and Nothingness she borrowed from Stephen a couple years ago — spread across the desk.

Maya’s just sat down and opened the Barbara Johnson when she hears shuffling in the doorway. “ Lollione was in today,” says Laura. She’s Maya’s oldest, closest friend: French literature, Duras, de Beauvoir, Cixous, all curves and those sort of floral flowy dresses that Maya felt too old to pull off at twenty-two.

Laura wears maroon lipstick; besides that her face is bare.

They’ve been friends for twenty years, lumped together early. Maya, the Woolf scholar, and Laura with all those Frenchwomen and their feelings, all that sex. It seemed everyone in the department was hoping the two of them would keep each other occupied. And they have, mostly. There are few people in the world with whom Maya would rather sit and talk.

“She’s not even taking my class!” Laura says. She has a student nearly every year who maddens her, whom Laura whispers about even as the girl (as she always is) follows Laura doggedly around. Laura sits on one of the chairs opposite Maya, slips her feet out of her shoes, and crosses her legs. “I think she changed her name from Jessica while she was an undergrad.” She twirls her right foot in slow circles as she talks. “I heard her talking to a boy before class the other day, a young one, very bright. He was asking her how old she was when her family left Korea.” Laura fiddles with her earrings as she speaks. They’re silver, long layers of leaves that reach the length of her neck. “They mistake her lisp for an accent,” she says and laughs a little, leaning her head back; her hands cup her neck now and her eyes roll up into her head. “The girl grew up in Queens.”

Maya nods toward the door. “Either stop or close the door before she hears.”

Laura jumps up, and Maya watches her dress flutter, brown with reds and yellows, around her ass and ankles — then walks back to Maya’s desk and pulls the chair close. “Oh, she wouldn’t care if she heard me. She’d misconstrue it as a compliment.”

Laura sits down and puts her elbows on the desk and then props her chin up on her palms.

“She’s a child,” says Maya, leaning back in her chair and reaching for a book behind her, not pulling it from the shelf, just running her hand along its edge. “She’s just desperate for you to like her. They all are. They worship you. ”

“Oh, and I pretend to like her,” says Laura. “I listen carefully to all the hackneyed things she says.” The earrings glint under the lamplight and weak swaths of sun come through the window as Laura shakes her head. “And I want to scream at her to please just go to law school like her parents want.”

Maya leans forward again. “You don’t mean that.”

“Please, Maya,” says her friend. “You can’t possibly not hate at least one of them a year.” Hands to earrings again, then back to neck. “They’re so entitled, some of them,” she says. “As if having an opinion is enough to make them interesting .”