The Careful Undressing of Love Read online

  We haven’t been careful.

  Then I remember it is ridiculous, all of this. Devonairre Street and everything I love—everything that feels comfortable and familiar but also sometimes cruel. I remember that no one has died in two years and Curses aren’t real and humoring Angelika isn’t the same thing as believing her. I remember that Delilah is my best friend and that we are one entity—LornaCruzCharlotteDelilahIsla.

  I look to Cruz and Charlotte and Isla. Old ladies hurl words at Delilah, but the four of us are fast and get to her side before too many of them hit her dead-on.

  Irresponsible.

  Selfish.

  Hubris.

  You know better.

  I take Delilah’s right arm and Cruz finds her left and we pull her out of there—me, Cruz, Charlotte, and Isla flocking around her like bodyguards—like she’s ours, which she is. Delilah is nervous-laughing but also almost crying, and Isla loses her tiara and pauses for a moment like she might pick it up instead of continuing on with us. But we make our way out of the garden and down to the end of the street, to the place where the Devonairre meets the park. To the bit of sidewalk that means we are Devonairre Street Kids and the rest of Brooklyn isn’t.

  2.

  “What was that?” Isla says. She’s asking Cruz mostly, but the rest of us, too.

  Charlotte with her epic braids and thick glasses lies back on the grass like the whole episode has worn her out. Delilah sits down and shakes her shoulders like she’s a wet dog and Angelika is water.

  “That was Angelika trying to scare me into celibacy,” Delilah says. Her legs are shaking, but she’s smiling and shrugging so maybe she’s okay. “She can probably tell I cut my hair again last week. Public stoning seems like a fair punishment.”

  I lean back on my elbows in the grass and don’t worry about the leaves that are going to attach themselves to my hair. Isla and I giggle. Isla and I giggle easily, and Delilah can make anything into a joke. Even today.

  “What happens now?” Charlotte wrings her hands. She picks at the grass and looks at Delilah like maybe she sees something on her, too.

  “Worst birthday ever,” Cruz says. “Angelika’s getting nuttier every year. What a mess.”

  “Good thing it’s not really anyone’s birthday,” Delilah says. Isla and I laugh again.

  It isn’t funny, though. Not this time.

  Cruz sits then, and so does Isla. All us girls are in blue dresses and Cruz is in a blue shirt and this is something that happens more often than coincidence would allow. LornaCruzCharlotteDelilahIsla is a thing that used to be a joke but is the kind of joke that is real.

  No one’s followed us over here. There’s nothing left for Angelika or any of the other old ladies to tell us. We know what they believe. We know what they want us to do.

  But we can’t stop ourselves from falling in love. And if we believed in the Curse at all, that’s exactly what we’d be trying to do.

  I remember the first time Angelika spelled it out for me, a year after we’d moved to the street. Cruz and I were on the sidewalk, drawing chalk stick figures, hearts, and monsters on the pavement. Angelika was watching from her stoop as usual, her dog barking up a storm.

  “You two are spending a lot of time together, aren’t you?” she asked. Cruz and I looked at each other. I liked his curls and that he let me choose what color chalk I wanted before he picked his chalk. I liked how the stick figures he drew had heads and legs but no torsos.

  We shrugged.

  “Be careful. Have you been told about the Curse?”

  Cruz and I shook our heads. Angelika’s accent made the word Curse sound even more dangerous.

  “The Curse of Devonairre Street,” she said, the same way she announced the titles of storybooks when she read to us. “Long ago, a generation of ungratefulness brought about a need for sacrifice. Any girl who lives on this street for more than one year shall forever be Cursed.” Angelika paused to make sure she had our attention. She did. Her back was straight and her eyes unblinking. She spoke slowly, as if every word were more important than the one before. “If a Devonairre Street Girl falls in love with any boy, whether or not he loves her back, the boy will die. Devonairre Street Girls must not fall in love. That is the responsibility, that is the Curse, that is what is true.” I could tell she had said it before, many times. It had a rhythm, a pace, a crescendo at the end that made me drop my chalk on the sidewalk, shattering it into purple dust. “You hear that, Lorna? I’ll say it again, if you weren’t listening.”

  Angelika always ends sentences that way. I’ll say it again, if you weren’t listening.

  But I heard her the first time.

  Cruz and I each took one step away from each other. All it did, though, was make me extra aware of the air between our hands. It felt electric.

  My father died four years later in the Bombing. So did Cruz’s.

  The chalk hearts got washed away. I’d like to draw them again, though. To show her I’m not scared.

  • • •

  “I do love Jack, you know,” Delilah says. She’s cross-legged and making knots with blades of grass. Jack Abbound has an oceanic wave in his blond hair and hands fit for a piano player. He carries a flask and looks at Delilah like she’s Niagara Falls.

  “Oh, we know,” Isla says. “Everyone knows.”

  We are LornaCruzCharlotteDelilahIsla and we aren’t afraid of love, even if we’re supposed to be.

  “What’s it feel like?” I ask, and Delilah tells me as best she can.

  3.

  “The A train is crap,” Isla says, arms crossed, on the subway out to the airport.

  “You didn’t have to come,” Delilah says.

  Isla shrugs. It’s always out there—the idea that we could go places alone, take the subway as far out as it goes, to Coney Island or the Bronx or the tip-top of Manhattan, and walk the streets by ourselves, one girl with long hair, one key around one neck.

  It never happens.

  Especially not today.

  We travel in a pack everywhere we go—to school, on errands, to parties—like one being.

  When we’re together, everyone can all tell we are Different. The whole city of New York. New and old Brooklyn residents. The lonely Midwesterners who have made this city their home. The kids from the suburbs who like to pretend they belong. The constant barrage of tourists who want to head to Times Square and buy photographs of the way it used to look.

  Isla swings around the subway pole. Charlotte keeps putting her hand on Isla’s elbow in an effort to stop her, but Isla Rodriguez is an unstoppable force.

  “What time does your mom get in?” I ask. Delilah scrolls through her phone. Mrs. James never tells us much about her monthly retreats, but they involve yoga and days of silence and nights of chanting and trying to heal.

  Mrs. James loves the word heal, even though Angelika hates it.

  “Our job is to remember, not forget,” Angelika reminds Mrs. James every month when she leaves in the early morning for a flight to somewhere beautiful and quiet and decidedly Not Here.

  Delilah never gets invited on the trips. She calls them New Age Bullshit Money Sucks but happily eats dinner at our house most nights her mom’s gone and I don’t think she misses being stuck in her apartment with her mother and her yoga chants and her craft projects. Still, we’re diligent about going with her to meet Mrs. James at the airport after each and every trip.

  I’m not sure if meeting people at the airport is an official Devonairre Street rule or simply something we do. Sometimes it’s impossible to know the difference.

  “Plane gets in at seven,” Delilah says.

  “The airport is crap,” Isla says.

  “You just said the A train is crap.” Charlotte sighs.

  “They’re both crap,” Isla says, her voice getting louder. People stare. People always stare.
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  “It’s starting,” I whisper to Delilah. She looks around. The man in the navy fleece is pretending to look at his phone but he’s actually snapping a photograph of us. The woman in ripped jeans reading Scorpio: The Year Ahead keeps glancing up, then darting her eyes away. A few guys our age smirk and try out different disgusting things to say about Isla’s body or our hair or Delilah’s exquisite face.

  I cling to the key around my neck and wish we weren’t all in blue dresses today.

  I take inventory of the passengers. Women with shoulder-length hair and bored eyes, men with scruffy beards and wives who love them fearlessly, kids with overalls and sticky fingers and fathers.

  We are different.

  Isla bends backward from the pole, her back arching like she’s made of rubber. I swear I see her mouth the word Devonairre at navy-fleece guy.

  The train shudders to a stop and I stumble, so Delilah, on instinct, grabs me from behind, her arms hugging me and pulling me close to her. Even when the stop is over, she holds on. It feels good to be close. Charlotte twirls one of her heavy braids around her wrist.

  “Rapunzel!” a man who smells homeless and looks high calls out from across the car. “A whole group of Rapunzels!”

  “Heard it before,” Isla says, a little bit proud, I think, of the way we look like we have emerged from a fairy tale when everyone else looks like they’re coming from a cubicle or a sweaty yoga class.

  “Isla, there’s a free seat over there. Don’t you want to sit?” Charlotte says, tugging her braid even more tightly around her wrist.

  Isla wraps one leg around the pole and slides her hands up as high as they reach. She shakes her dark mane. She’s always treated the subway poles like playgrounds, and I think she doesn’t know how it looks, now that she’s turned from a little kid into one of us.

  I don’t want to tell her.

  “You can sit,” Isla says. Charlotte shoves her braids down the back of her shirt like hiding them will draw a line between her and us, but it doesn’t make a difference. It is a long train ride.

  • • •

  We head to the gate. We have a ritual of picking up doughnuts and lemonades at an off-brand store right before security and watching the planes fly in after we pass through.

  Today Delilah buys an extra doughnut for the youngest security guard.

  “I got you a present!” she says, with a Delilah-flourish. He gives her a look like he wants to devour her and I step closer so that he can’t.

  It doesn’t work. He gives me the look, too.

  “What’d I do to deserve this?” he says. He thinks he’s smiling, but it’s a leer.

  “Last time we were here you said you were jealous. We’re just being good citizens,” Delilah says. It isn’t meant to be flirtatious, but that doesn’t matter.

  “What good girls,” he says. His colleagues laugh. “No one ever talks about how nice you all are.”

  Delilah finally sees the thing I’ve been seeing all along. She shakes her head and digs in the doughnut bag to get one for herself. She takes a bite so big there’s no room left for words, and we pass through security without another word.

  I feel them watching us go.

  “It’d be easier if you weren’t so friendly,” I say.

  “It’d be easier if we weren’t so cute,” Delilah says, only a glimpse of unease flickering around the edges of her mouth.

  “Pilots!” Isla says when we get to the gate and see a mini-parade of them.

  Isla wants to be a pilot, but she’s never flown anywhere.

  “Hey!” she calls out to a few of the kinder-faced pilots. “Hey, which plane is yours?”

  Most of the men and women ignore her, but a guy with a mustache and a streak of gray hair can’t resist.

  “Right over there,” he says. “Flying to Miami.”

  “Can I see?” Isla says. “The inside, I mean? The cockpit?” It works every fourth time, but today the mustached pilot tenses at the word cockpit and shakes his head.

  “Come on,” Isla says, accidentally pouting and swaying and sticking out her chest. I want her to be seven again, or eleven, and able to be her exact self without anyone seeing something more into it.

  The pilot doesn’t reply.

  “Today is crap,” she says.

  “I know, we get it,” Charlotte says. Isla sighs so loud a few people turn to look.

  Some of them don’t turn away.

  I don’t even blame them. I like watching people here, too—especially the young couples going on honeymoons and the kids only a little older than I am going on volunteer missions to Africa and India and the Middle East. My heart flips at all the possibilities of the future.

  “That’ll be you girls soon,” Isla says, nodding her head in the direction of a girl and a boy still wearing leis and dopey smiles from a Hawaiian honeymoon. They’re holding hands and he’s kissing her neck and she’s shrugging—I bet with pleasure at the way the sensation zings from that one spot to the rest of her body. Their wedding bands glint in the crappy airport lights. Her hair is frizzy and his is braided and there are dozens of other couples just like them near our gate but I can’t imagine myself on a honeymoon in two years, even if that’s what Owen expects. I think Charlotte and Cruz might get married right out of high school, and a little bundle of nerves in my stomach tells me Delilah and Jack might, too.

  “You think?” Delilah says, all stars in her eyes and shifting up on her tiptoes, a thing she always does when she’s excited.

  “You want that to be you?” I ask.

  Charlotte wanders to the newsstand to read the article under the headline MAYOR AKBAR BACKS PREDICTIVE ARTS WORKERS UNION. She is the only one of us who has been to a psychic before and she insists on using the terminology they’ve given themselves. She says the word psychic is derogatory.

  She wouldn’t tell us what her future holds.

  Charlotte wears me out.

  “I want that to be me,” Delilah says, putting her hands on her cheeks to feel how warm she’s getting from the admission. The couple kisses on the lips, forgetting where they are.

  “God, you really do love Jack, huh?” I say.

  Delilah sighs. “He makes me want a lei and a gold ring and a veil and a different last name. I know it doesn’t sound like me, so don’t say it doesn’t sound like me.”

  “Delilah Abbound.” I try out the name because it is my job to be on her side and to hope for the same things she hopes for.

  “Pretty, right?” she says. “I think he’s talked to his dad about it.”

  I cover my heart with my hand. “Wow,” I say, even though I know it’s not so unusual anymore to get married as soon as it’s legal.

  I’m not uncomfortable with marriage, but I’m uneasy with the idea of Delilah wanting something different than I do. In two years our whole lives could be separate, in spite of the fact that we’ve lived practically identical ones until now.

  “You’ll be my maid of honor,” Delilah says, so dreamy she’s practically higher in the sky than the planes.

  “Okay. But you’ll have to come visit me in Ghana,” I say.

  “Okay. But when you come home you’ll live next door and tell us everything about it.” Delilah and I negotiate the future often. This is the first time Jack’s been part of it.

  I don’t mind, as long as I’m still part of it, too.

  “Yes,” I say, thinking of a little place of my own in the same Devonairre Street building as Jack and Delilah and all the love between them. I’ve lived with people who love each other before. I slept better, being close to it. I wouldn’t mind living in its shade again.

  A plane comes in—maybe Mrs. James’s—and we listen to the sound. It’s not loud, exactly, but it’s deep. It’s a felt sound.

  “You feel that, Lorna?” Delilah asks. She presses her nose against the
window, next to Isla. Charlotte glances around to take note of who is noticing us. A few older women smile in our direction. A little kid fails at whispering why do those girls look like that? to his mom. A few men whistle at us, and a girl who looks to be about twelve watches us like she wants to memorize the way we speak and move so that she can try it on for herself later.

  I try to see us the way they do. On our own, we’d look totally normal. Together, we’re something else.

  Together, we’re special.

  “Can I feel the planes coming in?” I ask. Of course I can feel them. Everyone can feel them. They make the floor vibrate and my ears ring. “Can’t miss it,” I say. “Nothing else like it.”

  “Yes. Exactly,” Delilah says with her Delilah smile, turning away from the window for a split second. “It’s that obvious. Love.”

  4.

  It’s Tuesday, so Owen’s in my bed.

  “I didn’t know it was your birthday,” he says. He overheard Charlotte saying something about the Shared Birthday at lunch this afternoon and he looked like he’d been hit. I’ve been waiting since lunch for him to say something about it, but Owen stews things over for a long time before letting them out. Even regular sentences—about the dentist or the way his father criticizes his haircut—take ages to get from beginning to end. When he speaks I think about a little boy kicking a stone on a long, winding road.

  Owen gets up to put on his underwear. He is not someone who likes to be naked without a purpose.

  “I mean Sunday,” he says, and I try to take in what he’s saying, but I’m more concerned with the long line of his torso and the unexpected flurry of hair below his waist. I like the way it all fits together—a collection of surfaces and textures that is only Owen’s. I wish he wouldn’t cover it up so quickly.

  My hands are behind my head and I stay naked on top of the quilt someone made for our family after the Bombing. It’s gray and blue and reminds me of my father’s eyes but also the way he died in a puff of smoke.