Work Text:
not one girl I think
who looks on the light of the sun
will ever
have wisdom
like this
- Sappho, Fragment 56
I.
Emily, who’s full-grown but doesn’t feel like it, is packing up the house she grew up in.
Now that her mother’s gone, there’s nothing here to hold her there. Well. Not nothing. She looks at one of her photo albums splayed out on the bed, which opens to the exact right picture, one that has the power to take her all the way back in time.
She’s reminded of that fateful day by the pool. Immortality, my darlings, Alison had said, with her pretty wavy hair sitting just right on her neck and those eyes that seemed to know everything. And what a sight she was, and how Emily hung on her every word. They were so young then. They had no concept of what immortality might be, what it might feel like.
The picture is of the five of them, almost a candid, all of them wearing soft smiles under a late summer haze: Emily. Aria. Spencer. Hanna. Alison. Alison. Alison. Ali seems frozen in time in that picture, forever a little girl with more secrets than her puny hands could hold. At the time she seemed so inevitable. At the time she seemed like so much more than she was.
Now Emily’s married to that girl, and they’re both full-grown adults, and they have regular people problems like: how can I get Grace to stop fighting with Lily and share her toys. How can I get Lily to behave in public. How can we make sure Grace comes out of her little prim, polite shell. Do we want to have sex tonight even though we’re both tired from work. It’s exhausting. It’s wonderful.
She smiles.
She mounts the next cardboard box, kicking it open. Alison wanted to follow her, to help her, but she felt this was something she must do alone. She started with her own childhood bedroom only because she’s masochistic; she should have started with her mother’s private things, she knows, because those are the ones she really has to sort into piles of KEEP and GIVE AWAY and SELL. Or maybe she should have started with something less fraught, less filled to the beckoning brim with memories, something like the kitchen or the cabinet full of fine silverware they never used.
She finishes building the cardboard box. Stops. Stands there for a second.
Maybe she should have asked for help. Alison would be a good semi-neutral third party; she’d go around making split-second decisions, saying keep and lose forever and sell and oh god what was Pam thinking when she bought this and give away for the love of god and keep and keep.
This is, she knows, her own childhood home to bear. But it doesn’t stop her from both loving and loathing Alison, wishing she was there and wishing they’d never crossed paths.
The part of her that loves Alison will always win, though. She leaves the house a mess. She drives home.
II.
Alison’s lost in her own car-crashing trip down her own winding, turbulent memory lane.
In this one, she’s wearing Lucite heels and a skimpy off-white top. She’s ethereal on the dance floor and she knows it: magnetic, really, all eyes glued on her. She loves the attention. Or does she. Or does she really wish she could go away, stop keeping everyone’s secrets underneath her multiple wigs, most of all her own quickly ballooning ones.
Emily, at the party, looks so good. She moves sensuously, sinuously, all curves and budding muscles, unaware of her own compelling power. Her long black hair cascades down her back; her kind almond eyes, carefully lined, look fiery tonight, as if they’re lighting up the whole dance floor. Emily’s dancing with Ben, the tall and inoffensive boyfriend she just started to date: the jock boy and the jock girl, a perfect couple. Alison feels a murderous rage towards him. In the minute her eyes wander away from her date, some sophomore boy who’s in awe of her (and aren’t they all; and shouldn’t they be) who’s generously brought her a scoop of fruit punch and is prattling on about something she couldn’t care less about, not when Emily’s body, forged in mornings and evenings at the pool, is swaying like this, not when she’s smiling coyly, sweetly, like this.
She wants to ruin Ben’s life.
“Excuse me,” she says to the sophomore boy, interrupting him mid-sentence. She walks towards Emily, yanks her arm away from Ben. “Sorry, Ben,” Alison says, “borrowing her for a sec,” and she brutally pulls Emily along to a secluded corner of this dumb adult-chaperoned party. Emily follows her without question, because Emily, meek and wide-eyed, would follow her to the end of the world.
When they stop, Emily says pathetically, “I was dancing with Ben.”
“I don’t care.”
Alison wants to ruin Ben’s life, but she’ll settle for ruining Emily’s. She feels an urge to shove her against the wall, and she’s not usually physically violent, but she does. “What— Ali, what are you—”
“Shut up, Em,” Alison says, and gives up on punching Emily like she wants to do. She kisses her instead. When she steps away, Emily’s eyes are shut, like she’s savoring the moment.
“You’ll never be able to forget me, won’t you,” she whispers in Emily’s ear, giving her arm one last squeeze. “You’ll always love me the most. Remember that when you’re dancing with Ben.”
She walks away. She thinks she hears Emily’s weak protest, fading away behind her, “I… will…”
Loud door knocks startle her out of her reverie. It’s Lily, whining. “Mommy,” she starts, “Grace isn’t letting me play Barbies with her!”
Alison suddenly has a headache. “Grace,” she shouts halfheartedly from the edge of her bed, sitting up, “you have to let your sister play too.”
“But Lily always breaks them! She always wants to play car crash or hair pulling or fighting! I just want to play house like normal sometimes!”
Alison sighs. She considers going back to bed. Let them sort this out themselves. It’s good for kids that age, right? She feels she was never that young, four and six. She’s spent her life surrounded by girls who worshipped her and older men who preyed on her. Because that’s what they did. They’d tell her, you’re so mature for your age, no one understands me, and she’d spout off pearls of supposed wisdom about immortality to the other girls, thinking sensational feats and salacious secrets would be what it took to keep her living on forever, long after her body was gone. But now she looks upon her high school English students, so fresh-faced and full of acne, wondering if the girl they like likes them back, stressing over college applications and band practice, and she thinks: I was so young then. I was just a little child. I didn’t know anything.
Grace shouting, shrill, interrupts her closed-eye reverie. “Mommy! Lily’s pulling my hair!”
She has a dispute to settle. She has papers to grade. She has a life, an ordinary life but a life nonetheless, to live.
“Lily,” Alison says in her most terrifying, authoritative voice, the one that used to bring grown men to their knees, begging her to spare them. “Apologize to your sister.”
Lily swallows. “Okay,” she says, eyes wide. “Grace, I’m so sorry.”
Lily and Grace both have Emily’s almond eyes, her dark hair, maybe even her frame. When they grow up. I should sign them up for sports, Alison thinks. Get their energy out.
“Grace,” Alison continues. “You can take turns. Sometimes you can play with Lily, and play Lily’s wild stories, and sometimes, Lily, you can play house.”
Both girls nod. Now they’re eager, waiting for Alison to dismiss them.
“Also,” she shares, “there is no such thing as normal.”
She can tell they’re itching to run and play. “Go,” she says, “go play,” and her daughters run upstairs together with their Barbies, the dispute already forgotten.
The key turns. Emily’s coming home. Alison meets her at the door, eager.
“I missed you,” Alison says.
Emily’s eyes look tired as she comes closer and kisses her, chaste, soft, exhausted. “I missed you too. I don’t think I could do it without you.”
Alison smiles, and Emily smiles back, and she thinks, in a cliché she’d mark any student down for using: she is like the sun. The world I orbit around. “Then I’ll come by and help you tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” Emily agrees.
They tuck the girls into bed despite their protests. At night, they share a kiss before Emily falls asleep. Alison watches her for a little bit, the rise and fall of her chest. She thinks: my wife. My children. My students. All things she shouldn’t deserve and yet that she inexplicably possesses. Immortality. This is what it is.