The Careful Undressing of Love Read online

  Owen kisses my hair and hands me a coffee. It’s too hot but he snowed sugar all over it so it’s sweet and made just for me. I give him a smile. It hurts my face. I’m in some alternate reality where grief makes me laugh but kindness makes me want to scowl. I close my eyes for a little longer than a blink, to steady myself.

  Owen picks up a lemon with a bemused expression on his face. He rolls it between his hands.

  “It’s a lemon,” I say, hating the way he finds Devonairre Street adorable, even now.

  He puts it back down and shrinks a little.

  “Oh, are you collecting them for Delilah? I have five from my mom,” Charlotte says. She swings her tote bag onto her lap and hands me five more lemons. I start a pile next to me on the stoop.

  It’s hard to make them balance right, but I try until they’re semi-stable. “She’s not gonna want them.”

  Delilah doesn’t do the lemon tradition.

  Across the street, Angelika starts to open her windows. This is a tradition, too. The regular April chill has returned, but we’re supposed to leave the windows open for a week after someone dies, so that their soul can escape. We watch, rapt and bored and miserable all at once, while each of her seven visible windows shudders open.

  “Angelika’s about to make her grand appearance, I’m sure,” Cruz says.

  “I don’t want to see her,” Isla says. “I don’t want to see anyone but you guys. And Delilah. Jesus, where is Delilah?”

  Jack is dead.

  I give myself a shiver, an all-over-body shake that startles Owen, who is squeezed next to me on the steps.

  “You need a sweatshirt or something?” he says. “I can run upstairs and—”

  “No.” I’m watching Angelika open her door, step out, close it behind her, and forget about locking it up. She’s got a lemon in each hand. Isla turns her body sideways, like that will protect her from whatever Angelika is going to say or whatever look she’s going to give us.

  “You’re all together,” Angelika says when she reaches us. “That’s nice.” She looks at Cruz like she wants him to leave. She once asked him if he wanted to join the football team or maybe go off to military school. Cruz laughed but she wasn’t joking. It’s easier, usually, to pretend that she is.

  Angelika hands the lemons to me, and I put them in my lap.

  “She’s going to need more than that,” Angelika says. Owen starts to laugh, realizes no one else is, and stops. “I expect you will take care of finding more for her?”

  We all shrug.

  “I’ll say it again if you weren’t listening.” Angelika’s hands find her hips and she frowns.

  “More lemons,” Cruz says, but it doesn’t sound like he means it and Angelika can tell.

  “I’m sure more people will bring them by,” Charlotte says. She knows how to talk to Angelika since she’s lived on the top floor of Angelika’s building forever. “It’s early. You know Ambika and Iris like to sleep in. And my mom went to the store. I’m sure she’ll clear them out. Don’t worry.”

  “You say don’t worry? I worry. I’m worrying right now. You think we shouldn’t all be worrying?” Angelika’s eyes are the lightest blue and they look right at me. Her hair is the silverest white. She wears it in a low bun like my mother wears hers, but without the sheen of hairspray. Her disappointment in us is not new but it’s thicker today than it’s ever been before.

  “You are not meant to be”—she pauses, looking for the right word—“wild.” Isla and I both have our hair out—loose and uncombed. Isla’s hair curls and winds and tangles up in itself. Mine is thin and flat and too close to the color of Angelika’s. “You girls have the long hair but the wrong hearts. It never used to be this way.”

  That is another favorite phrase of hers: It never used to be this way.

  “The rules are simple, and in simpler times, we followed them,” she continues, looking each of us in the eye. We don’t remind her that even she didn’t start following the rules until Chester died.

  We don’t talk about how Angelika is a Devonairre Street Girl, too.

  When Angelika speaks, you get the impression she is speaking to the world, not only to you. She uses words carefully, as if they are being recorded, and gives a proud hmph after every few sentences.

  We used to apologize, when we were littler.

  We don’t now.

  “There is more for you to do than sit on the stoop and wish things were different from the way they are.” For someone who spends most of her time on her own stoop, Angelika says this with surprising ease.

  “Delilah’s not into the lemon thing,” I say, knowing it won’t matter to Angelika.

  “What did I say at the Shared Birthday?” Angelika digs her heels into the pavement, and I watch her weight shift back on to them. It’s a slight movement, but imperative. She’s angry. “So stubborn, all of you. I warned her, didn’t I? I did.” She hmphs again and looks at Owen, like she’s only now realizing he’s even here. “You don’t listen, you children. I told you we’d be here, and here we are and you all seem so surprised.”

  It’s cruel. Charlotte bows her head and Cruz’s jaw tightens. Isla gets up from the stoop and pretends she has something very important to look for on the sidewalk.

  “Please don’t say that to Delilah, when you see her,” I say. We never speak back to Angelika, even when she’s at her most brutal. But there’s a look of pride on her face—a sparkle in her eyes, a lift of her lips—that tells me she’s not pleased exactly, but certainly a little smug that Jack is gone. I’m scared that if I say nothing she’ll bask in that smugness, she’ll pat herself on her back for knowing this would happen and she’ll forget the way we’re all broken and ruined by the fact that it did.

  I don’t want her to show up at Delilah’s apartment with bowls of lemons and books of chants and Tupperware containers stuffed with lamb and rosemary and eggs and tell Delilah it’s all her fault.

  That Jack is dead.

  Goddammit, my mouth twitches with a smile again at the ridiculous reality, and I don’t catch it in time to hide it.

  “How old was the Abbound boy?” Angelika says.

  She says the words boy and girl in a particular manner that I’ve always noticed. Boy comes out sad, with the oy sound long and winding. Girl is said with a tiny growl in the middle. The kind of thing that could be her accent, but isn’t.

  We don’t answer. It hurts too much. Everything hurts too much—sitting, talking, holding lemons in our hands, sipping at coffee, making eye contact, thinking about Jack. I start to giggle. I hold my sides and puff out my cheeks to make it stop but it won’t.

  “Jack Abbound.” Angelika closes her eyes. I’m sure she’s thinking about all the people who know his name, all the people who could possibly know about us. “Was he good?”

  Charlotte starts to cry and Cruz holds her. I know it must feel great—I’ve been held by Cruz before while crying. His arms don’t move. He doesn’t give a back rub or a long squeeze or a hair brush. He stays perfectly still and solid.

  “I’ve tried to protect you all. But you won’t listen. Maybe now you’ll listen.” Angelika’s chin shakes and I think we’re about to see something new on her face, but she purses her lips, hmphs, and the moment is gone.

  Jack is dead.

  “Please,” I say. And there’s more I want to get out about how unimportant lemons and Curses and warnings are right now, but I can’t say any of it because lemons are dropping from my lap and tumbling down the steps and onto the sidewalk and I am laughing and laughing and laughing and Isla is running after the lemons to pick them up and Cruz puts a hand on one of my shoulders and Owen gets up off the stoop like my breakdown is contagious and Charlotte’s cries are throaty and powerful and two more women are approaching us with lemons in each hand and I am laughing so hard my nose is running and Jack is dead.

 
And then I am crying.

  • • •

  When the crying’s over, Angelika gives me a pack of tissues. She always has them with her. It’s a bit of the softness that balances out her sharp parts.

  The lemons are next to me on the stoop again and Owen is rubbing my back and Cruz is looking at me like I am someone entirely new.

  “Jack is dead,” I say. Finally, it doesn’t make me smile.

  “You can keep some of the lemons for yourself,” Angelika says.

  “Do you . . . make something with them?” Owen asks. Everyone’s speaking more quietly now, and I wonder whether we’ll have to whisper around Delilah when she gets back. A selfish part of me doesn’t want to see her—it’s like watching footage of the Bombing or seeing open caskets or looking through Devonairre Street widows’ photo albums. I don’t like to look at the pain head-on.

  “The lemons are for healing,” Angelika says.

  “. . . How?” I like that Owen asks questions when the rest of us are so used to never being given explanations or reasons.

  “When the Curse began,” Angelika says, and all our shoulders move toward our ears at the word Curse, “my mother had a lemon tree. It only ever had one or two lemons at a time. She kept it in the apartment and not much sun got in and it was a silly thing. A silly pretty thing.” She looks at us like we, too, are silly pretty things. “But when the first men died in the war, the tree blossomed. A dozen lemons. More. The branches sagged, there were so many lemons. There was no reason for them to appear, all of a sudden. My mother decided they appeared because we needed them. My mother was the kind of woman who believed—as we all should—that if something is provided, it’s because a need has opened up. So she brought lemons to all the widows or girls who lost boys they loved. She did it the rest of her life. The tree gave for a long time, and when that tree died, the rest of the street carried on with the tradition anyway. Traditions don’t come out of nowhere. They come from something sacred and strange. We hold on to them because we have to do everything we can to fight the Curse, don’t we?”

  We all hang our heads.

  We have never believed in the Curse.

  “Don’t we?” Angelika says again. “I’ll say it again, if you weren’t listening.” From the corner of my eye, I see Charlotte nod.

  “Oh. Well,” Owen says, a perplexed look crossing over his face. “I can get her some lemons, too, I guess.”

  Angelika puts a hand on his arm and gives him a tight, sad smile. She doesn’t tell him to stay away. She doesn’t tell me to let him be. She doesn’t give us a stern warning about love.

  She puts her hand on his cheek and lets it linger. She smiles.

  • • •

  By the time Delilah comes home, an hour later, we have two dozen lemons on the stoop. It is categorically too many lemons, I don’t care what Angelika says.

  Delilah is slumped over and I barely recognize her face. It’s blotchy and her eyes are pink. Her T-shirt is stretched out, like she’s been pulling at it all night, and one of her shoulders is exposed.

  A couple walking their dog down our street straighten their backs when they see her. She brings them to attention. Even damp faced and messy, she is worth stopping everything for. I see them see her, and I see them see us. We are all in last night’s clothes, twisting and tugging and trying to comb through our hair. Delilah’s droops, mine tangles, Isla’s grows, Charlotte’s slips out of frizzy braids.

  The dog barks at Delilah’s grief or maybe her beauty.

  The girl wraps a hand around her boyfriend’s neck, trying to turn him to face her instead. She sulks. She squirms. She kisses his bottom lip.

  They won’t be coming back to this street.

  “You’re home,” I say when the couple has passed and we can speak without the outside world looking in.

  Owen, Cruz, Charlotte, and Isla move off the stoop. They know Delilah probably only has room in her brain to deal with one person and that one person is me. Her mom waits for her down the street, her arms crossed and her back straight, and I think Mrs. James will have to fall apart behind closed doors and I probably will, too.

  “Not really,” Delilah says, and I know what she means but it breaks my heart.

  Angelika stands at her stoop across the street. She watches. She waits.

  I don’t say I’m sorry. I don’t want to be a person that says the same things everyone else is saying. There’s a grief handbook everyone’s read and I don’t want to talk from that. I want us to be Lorna and Delilah even if only for an instant.

  I pull Delilah in for a hug and don’t notice that Angelika has moved from her stoop to the sidewalk, to the very place we are standing. I smell her before I see her—Aramis hits me hard and I pull Delilah tighter.

  “I remember the day my Chester died,” Angelika says, and I hold Delilah closer still. Maybe if I squeeze her hard enough she won’t be able to hear Angelika at all.

  “The grief never quite ends,” Angelika goes on, and I feel Delilah shift away from me a little. She pulls back and I let my arms loosen, against my better judgment.

  “Not right now, please,” I say. Angelika looks angry for a moment—she hates being told what to do. But she shakes it off with a shiver of her shoulders.

  “Delilah needs someone who understands. I understand,” Angelika says. “You remind me so much of myself, sweetheart.”

  Delilah steps out of my arms entirely. Her eyes are glazed over, her limbs limp. She turns and lets herself be held by Angelika instead of me. Through the dozens of open windows, the neighborhood watches. They should know to let the moment be private; they’ve been in this moment before. But the widows of Devonairre Street have their elbows on their windowsills, their chins cupped in their hands.

  It’s amazing what people forget, the moment tragedy has moved from their shoulders onto someone else’s.

  I hate what they’re seeing. Angelika and Delilah in an embrace.

  I hate my empty arms.

  “I should have listened,” Delilah says, her whole body hiccupping, then slumping back down.

  “It’s not because of—” I try, but her face is in the swoop of Angelika’s shoulder and I don’t think she can hear me.

  “I’m here for you,” Angelika says, a little louder than is necessary. Loud enough so that everyone can hear. “I share in this tragedy with you. It is ours, together.”

  I think Delilah nods. The watching widows nod, too. I fight the impulse to pull Delilah off Angelika. To insist the tragedy is ours, not theirs.

  Eventually Angelika lets her go, and Delilah stands between the two of us. I shuffle so that I am a little bit closer to Delilah than Angelika is.

  “Help me with the lemons,” Delilah says, speaking to both of us, I guess.

  “Of course,” Angelika says.

  “I’ve got it,” I say. I want a moment alone with my best friend. But Angelika’s not having it. I see her glance at the women in the windows, smiling a little at the way they’re watching her. I would think Angelika might not even be strong enough to carry an armful of lemons—her hands shake sometimes and her arms are weak. But she grabs five of them, cradling the fruit between the crooks of her elbows. Her back is straight and proud. I take as many as I can, and we carry them like that, in little awkward armfuls, from the stoop to Delilah’s kitchen, where her mom has set up big fruit bowls on the counter.

  It takes a few trips, but Angelika doesn’t tire.

  Lemons keep dropping out of my arms and rolling down the street. Angelika manages to keep all of hers from falling. Delilah holds each one like it’s a fragile thing.

  The thing is, Delilah hates lemons.

  But when we’re all done, she sits at the counter and stares at the bowls, at the neon cheeriness, like they mean something to her.

  And she asks me to leave.

  Only me.

&
nbsp; 7.

  The next morning I open all the windows.

  It’s raining and soon there will be stains on the walls and the floor and water soaking through the sheer gold curtains but I don’t care.

  “You opened the windows,” Mom says when she wakes up and sees me on the couch, wrapped in two sweaters, watching rain hit the screen and drip-drip-drip to the ground below.

  “I brought lemons over, too, before you ask,” I say.

  “We don’t usually do all this,” Mom says. “We do the hair and the tea and the cake and the outside lights.”

  “And the Shared Birthday. And the keys around our necks.” I play with mine, spin it around and around until it hits my clavicle and stops.

  Mom slumps a little. “Well. When we move to California, we won’t have to do any of that. We’ll have so much freedom. And the ocean.”

  “Sure,” I say. California is the place we talk about going when we are irritated with Angelika or our long hair or the taste of lamb. It’s the place we talk about going when someone’s stared too long at us on the street or at a restaurant or lying out in the park.

  “We got approached again,” Mom says, not seeing how desperately I want to be quiet and listen to the rain coming down. “Some really serious buyers. Life-changing money, Lorna. California money. House-on-the-beach money.”

  I look at her like I’ve never seen her before. “What are you talking about?”

  “I thought some good news on a terrible day might—”

  “Jack is dead,” I say, because it’s the only refrain in my mind, and I think if she starts hearing it over and over, too, she’ll understand how insane she sounds right now.

  “I know.”

  “Delilah isn’t going to be okay,” I say.

  “Eventually—”

  “This isn’t a California situation,” I say. “This isn’t a bad day. What’s wrong with you?”