We Run the Tides(39)

I start to answer her—I’ve already planned to lie—but a force greater than words twists inside of me and I vomit all over the back seat of the Jaguar.





21


When we get back to the house, Ewa sits me down at the kitchen table and makes me tea and toast.

“It’s decaffeinated,” she tells me, as though this is something that I would be concerned with at the moment. My only goal is keeping the toast down.

My parents are out at their auction and won’t be home for an hour. An enormous blessing. I have no idea how they’ll react to me getting wasted at the party for Maria Fabiola.

My heart is rattling against my ribs, my ribs are rattling against my heart.

“How do you feel?” Ewa asks.

“Betrayed.”

“By who?” she says.

“Whom,” I say.

“Who?”

“I feel betrayed by my femininity.”

“I wish I had something wise to say right now,” she says, and looks at me with mercy and pity. I can tell she thinks she’s seeing herself as a young woman. I let her stare. Her eyes scan my hair, where a strand of vomit hangs like tinsel.

“The best advice I can give you is to take a shower, shampoo well, and go to bed,” she says. “I have extra pads in the cabinet behind the mirror if you need them.”

In the bathroom, I see someone who looks like me but is paler and bloated. In the bathtub’s soap dish I spot Ewa’s razor that she uses to shave her legs, and probably her armpits. I’ve never shaved any part of myself. There are three mirrors—a triptych—that cover the medicine cabinet. If I arrange them a certain way—with the mirrors on the left and right facing inward, they produce a thousand reflections. I pick up the razor and stand on top of the toilet, so I can see the multiple me’s.

My pubic hair is darker than my hair. It’s curly and, I decide, unruly. I take the razor and push as hard as I can and swipe it left and right over the small mound of my pubis.

Then I start screaming. The blade is filled with hair and there’s more blood. First the blood emerges in tiny, multiple drops, then gushes. And the burning sensation is unbearable. I leap down from the toilet seat, jabbing my toe against the sharp edge of the bathroom scale. I run to the shower. The water pressure helps. A pool of pink circles my feet and I step off the drain. I press a washcloth against my pubis—pressure is the only thing that helps.

It’s suddenly clear to me that I wasn’t supposed to push the razor so hard against my tender skin. It also occurs to me that I was supposed to use soap and water, that that’s why razors are often seen on the soap dishes of bathtubs.

I start sobbing in the shower. I cry and cry until the water turns cold. Then I cry because I’m freezing.

Outside the bathroom door, I hear Ewa screaming. “If you don’t unlock this door in one minute, I’m knocking it down.”

I turn off the water and crawl to the door and let her in.

“I’m sorry but I think I destroyed your razor,” I say.

*

THE NEXT MORNING the sharp pain wakes me. I feel like I’m on fire. I sit up. I have a headache, but the pain coming from between my legs is so intense that it makes my headache seem minor.

Ewa has left aspirin outside the door to my room. I swallow two without water and the chalkiness of the pills makes me gag.

When I make it downstairs I find my father lying flat on the dining room table. He’s covered with a white sheet like he’d dead, but I know he’s alive because Ewa is humming while giving him a massage. The protective padding is on the table, which is a good thing, because we never use this table for casual dinners. But apparently we use them for massages.

“I was just telling your father that maybe you should walk on his back,” Ewa says to me. “I’m too heavy, but you would be the right weight.”

“Okay,” I say. I know I’m going to have to be agreeable, to make amends to everyone in the house.

The front doorbell rings. Maybe it’s another Swedish au pair on the run, I think. I open the door and Maria Fabiola is standing before me. She looks so much smaller than she did last night, so much more my size now that we’re on the same level and she’s wearing jeans instead of a dress. But her fury is huge. Her fury is a force I can feel before she opens her mouth.

“That was my party and you ruined it,” she says. She puts her bag down on the brick entranceway so I can tell she plans to stay.

I step outside and close the door behind me. I don’t want my dad and Ewa hearing this.

“I don’t know how I ruined it,” I say. I don’t remember throwing up until I got into the Jaguar, but I don’t volunteer this information.

“Seriously? All anyone can talk about is how you got blood all over Axel. He’s told everyone.”

“Why would you even want to be set up with someone like him?” I ask.

She screams a scream of frustration instead of answering. Even her hair, which has lost its hair-sprayed hold, is extending out from her head like exclamation points.

“I don’t know how you managed to make last night about you, but you did,” she says.

“All I did was get my period.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“You know what’s disgusting?”