How Did You Get This Number Page 11

  I was taking one of my regular constitutionals around the halls, clutching the pass and sidestepping the discolored spots of tile, which were known to have a high concentration of cooties. I snooped in the supply closet, which held only makeshift aisles of paper reams and boxes of No. 2 pencils but in which I fantasized were hidden secret documents implicating the school in a national scandal. Or, at the very least, the blueprints of the building, which would at long last prove it was an exact replica of a medieval dungeon.

  By this time I actually had to pee. I walked into the girls’ room and did a quick visual sweep under the stalls. I was going through a phase where I felt uncomfortable when people could hear me going to the bathroom. I’m still going through it, really. Problems arise when the biological and the social get too close. Why do people persist in carrying on a conversation from the adjoining stall, forcing me to flush on them mid-sentence? It’s amazing that we listen to one another release piss and excrement into porcelain tubs and then pretend like nothing happened. We hear the difference between a healthy digestive system and one that has been plied with beer and cheese fries the previous night. It’s not that I desperately longed to have open conversations about bowels and pus and mucus. I had a roommate like that once, who used to stare quizzically at the food globules on her used dental floss and encouraged me to do the same. I no longer live with this person.

  My eyes stopped sweeping when I saw two tie-dyed Keds with blue ink tattooed around each sole. The fringes of a pair of stonewashed jeans covered the laces. Zooey. I opened the stall adjacent to hers, made myself a toilet-paper wreath, and sat. I enjoyed the idea of catching Zooey being human, even if it meant I had to listen to someone in the next stall. I also enjoyed the anonymity. I imagined her feeling as embarrassed as I would have been.

  “Owwwwum,” she whimpered. “Ow o wow. Hooooof. ”

  Silence again. Followed by a throat clear.

  “O wow ow, shit, ow, ” she whimpered, louder this time. Something was very wrong.

  “Zooey?”

  My voice was tentative as a ream of toilet paper rolled on the ground from one stall to the next. She slid her feet closer together until the rubber bumpers of her Keds touched.

  “Everything okay in there?”

  At the unripe age of ten and three quarters, Zooey’s body had gone ahead and won itself the distinction of first period in our class. Despite her mother’s encouragement to stick with the “less interfering” feminine hygiene products, Zooey was ready to take on the tampon. I was listening to the sound track of her first attempt. A process that sounded so atrocious that when my time came years later, I thought of nothing but. I practiced the art of relaxing my own muscles by lying on my bed and pretending someone had just knocked me unconscious with a frying pan, conveniently anesthetizing every nerve in my body except the ones in my right arm.

  Zooey was not used to being embarrassed, and thus had no storage container for her shame. She had no practice in suppressing awkward moments the way the rest of us had. Instead, it kind of free-form spread all over her like a rash.

  “Please, please, don’t tell anyone,” she implored, her voice extra-breathy and high.

  Who would I tell? I couldn’t imagine. Where would “Zooey’s bleeding like a stuck pig” fit into a conversation about the merits of wall clocks in the shape of Swatch watches?

  “I won’t, I swear.”

  We were at that age when it’s difficult to imagine others not thinking as you do. I assumed Zooey was paranoid about en masse urination because I was paranoid about en masse urination. Likewise, she asked me to keep her secret because if it had been me trying to negotiate with a cotton missile, she would have told everyone by lunchtime.

  I coached her via the Lamaze breathing techniques I had seen in talking-baby movies. Not in possession of a stick to bite, Zooey reached her non-nether-region-exploring hand under the stall for me to grab. I hesitated on hygienic grounds, unsure if that expression about one hand not knowing what the other is doing could be applied so literally.

  “I’m just going to get it over with.” She wiggled her fingers again.

  Not only was this a bonding moment between Zooey and me but a much-needed bonding moment between Zooey and the rest of womankind. I reached down and squeezed the hand of Zooey Ellis as she inserted her first tampon.

  We walked out of the girls’ room in silence, passing the supply room and making a right at the classroom where M.A.S.P. met. M.A.S.P. was an acronym for “More Able Student Program.” The administration has since changed it to S.O.A.R., which presumably expands into a more polite label than “Other People’s Children Are Idiots.” Before we parted ways, we stopped and glanced through the square window in the door. Neither Zooey nor I were in M.A.S.P. Through the window we saw kids gathered in organic clumps, chatting. We moved in closer. One day soon this group would include Rachel Hermann. Rachel, who would laugh and gesticulate in a way she never did when she was with us. In a smattering of seldom-seen instances of bonding, Zooey and I would spy on Rachel. We would watch as Rachel regaled the room with her stories, commanding the attention of anyone in her orbit. Perhaps the fellow geniuses brought out the girl in Rachel Hermann, whereas fellow girls brought out the quiet genius. I remember watching Zooey watch Rachel. As she glared, I realized that her profile was the perfect facsimile of one of the smiling and wicked teenage photos that graced the old Girl Talk box. So many rules crammed into such a pixie-sized head.

  Did I want to be Zooey Ellis? I think mostly I just didn’t want to be in her way.

  One night I found myself sitting on the floor of my room on the phone with her. I sensed the conversation was winding down for her, and my own bedtime loomed large. I scrunched my toes around the cord. I didn’t want her to hang up and have our final topic of conversation be about my family’s trip to Williamsburg, Virginia. A trip in which my sister locked me in a stockade and my cousin almost broke a colonial lantern.

  “Did he break it?” Her impatience was thicker than sound.

  “He almost broke it. He tripped and fell onto the velvet rope. It almost fell on the ground. It was really funny.”

  “So then he didn’t get in trouble.”

  “It wobbled.”

  In a last-ditch effort, I became instinctively Machiavellian, preying on the weakest social link I could think of. I knew that Zooey had put an extraordinary amount of effort into being politically correct around Rachel. But I also knew that she didn’t particularly like Rachel. She didn’t particularly like anyone. All she needed was a striking point, some flaw in Rachel located at a safe distance from the lack of penis in her household. I confided—speculated, really—that Rachel did not actually appear to be from California.

  “She’s really pale. And she doesn’t know how to surf. Which would be like not knowing how to ice-skate.”

  “I don’t know how to ice-stake.” Zooey remained unconvinced.

  “But you don’t walk out your front door onto an ice-staking rink. Everyone in California has a view of the ” ocean.

  The well of bogus logic from which one can draw as a preteen is bottomless. With that jet-black hair and those non-cornflower eyes, Rachel didn’t hail from the Christie Brinkley school of sunshine and tooth enamel. Zooey perked up. I had successfully superimposed my own ignorance of the West Coast onto Rachel until my incomplete image of her background made her incomplete as a person.

  In a matter of days the rumor spread, hopping like a coo-tie from one person to the next until one afternoon Zooey confronted her. As Rachel waited for one of her many moms to pick her up in the parking lot, Zooey tapped her on the shoulder and began baiting her, quizzing her about the California state flower. When Rachel shrugged, Zooey moved on to the bird, the gemstone, the fish, the vegetable. And the crowds, they gathered. Rachel was desperate to prove her origins, which seems like it would be simple enough. But this was before driver’s licenses, before library cards, before wallet-sized photos, before wallets period. We knew not t
he names of the highways on which we were driven nor the prices once we arrived at the local food chain that was, unbeknownst to us, local. Even quarters were just quarters, not yet embossed with state-specific horses and peaches. It was terrible, watching Rachel dig for relics in her backpack, pulling out a half-empty pack of Nerds (the flavor of which she claimed was not distributed on the East Coast) and a neon ruler she had brought with her, and finally holding up her wrist to show us the rainbow hemp bracelets that would stay there until they disintegrated.

  There is a keen need for evidence when you are young. My need was fed by watching my older sister, who had spades of evidence of being cool. The frayed sweatshirts from her hockey-team-captain boyfriend. The concert ticket stubs. The photos of her and her friends slumped against a brick wall outside the movies with their arms draped around one another. It was enough to make you wonder who did their blocking. But you didn’t need an older sister for social show-and-tell. You just needed to live in the world.

  Zooey grabbed the ruler from Rachel’s hand.

  “Then how do you explain this?” she hissed, gesturing at the damning lettering on the back: MADE IN CHINA.

  Before she could respond, Rachel’s mother arrived. I could see her already starting to cry as they pulled out of the rounded driveway. I could also see the resemblance—this mommy was her biological mommy. A free hand reached around to squeeze her daughter’s shoulder.

  It occurs to me now that instead of flying into the passenger seat, all Rachel had to do was march over to the California plates on the car and point. Even as an adult, I am still looking for ways for her to win that fight. How can we not still be rooting for the younger versions of ourselves as if they actually exist, playing catch-up in time? Who wouldn’t like to implant their current brains into a scenario from the past? SATs be damned, how about the insertion of a few eloquent turns of phrase when, for no discernible reason, Michael Gruzman called me “baloney boobs” on the bus home for a whole year? At the time I could only fold my arms over my mild-mammaried chest and stare out the window, wishing I had the superhuman strength required to slide open one of those school-bus windows and push Michael Gruzman out of it. Surely now I could at least eke out a “Shut it, assclown.” Or match the boys in physical development jokes, quoting Truman Capote when he was asked to sign a man’s penis: “I couldn’t sign it, but perhaps I could initial it?”

  Oh, yes, I could have sixth grade on a string. And if I did, I would stop the tape, rewind, and flick the big plastic arrow of time to point Rachel in the direction of her mother’s license plates.

  AS TIME PASSED AND MORE OF OUR PEERS JOINED Zooey in the Active Uterus Club, I became less exempt from her wrath. Zooey’s prior embarrassment had been alleviated by the acquisition of breasts and the subsequent attention and confidence they provided. She was a well-oiled machine of lady. My own body, meanwhile, was about as functional as the combination lock on my locker, which refused to do as it was told. By eighth grade, it seemed that the crimson wave had swept through every fallopian tube but mine.

  It was only a matter of time before Zooey caught on to the mootness of our friendship. In the matter of personal injury, she could be exceedingly vicious and random, like a tornado touching down at untraceable intervals. One day, after the janitor had to pry open my actual locker, I found Zooey had cut different-sized and -colored letters out of her Seventeen and YM magazines, gotten out her rubber cement, and crafted what looked like a ransom note:

  YoU R a Looser.

  I had several elements on my side, spell-check among them. I also questioned the choice of “ransom” as a note-leaving genre. I stood agape in the hallway, my shoulders as slouched as my socks, thinking: And? Was there no price to pay? I flipped the note over, anticipating a “thus your entire pencil collection must be left in the earth-science cubbies by noon oR ElSe.” But the other side was just a mess of glue outlines. Then the note’s ingenuity dawned on me. It managed to combine both threat and punishment in one. Like a parking ticket. Zooey abruptly stopped being my friend. And there was no challenging a verdict like that. Her rules were tighter than her vagina.

  It was not a bad thing when Zooey’s family moved to Arizona. She hadn’t spoken to me for years. Which wasn’t so different from when she was speaking to me. Her daily presence was like a wolf’s glowing eyes in the woods. It might not be chewing your face off right this very minute, but you felt a hell of a lot better when it was gone. Unsurprisingly, the top triangle on the food pyramid was self-regenerating. But no girl who assumed the apex had the power and prestige of a Zooey Ellis. As it is with all political movements, after the social unrest has settled, after the statue is removed from the square, the rose-colored nostalgia begins. Who would pass notes about us now? Who would rule recess with an iron Trapper Keeper? Would white T-shirts under strappy floral dresses have been permitted under Zooey’s regime?

  The world may never know. But high school happened without her, and it wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t that good, either. But at least I could go to the bathroom safe in the knowledge that all my major biological developments had come to pass. There was no longer a need to confess the details of each other’s private space. So much real was happening outside the stall door, it became difficult to hold on to frivolous paranoias. Fear of physical exposure (noogies, pantsings, spitballs, defecation) gave way to fear of social exposure (crushes, rejections, awkward friendship transgressions). I scanned for feet with decreased frequency. Until I didn’t at all. I just went to the bathroom like a normal person.

  EIGHTY-FOUR CYCLES LATER I FOUND MYSELF standing in the ladies’ room of a Burger King on East 116th Street, holding a notepad in one hand and a can of pepper spray disguised as a tube of lipstick in the other.

  I was spending the semester at Columbia University, and I approached my first stint as a New York City resident with the wide-eyed verve of a midwesterner. Except that, unlike a midwesterner, I did it with the intention of obscuring the wide-eyed-ness as quickly as possible. I did not go up to the Statue of Liberty’s crown to marvel at the view so much as to get it over with. Having grown up within spitting distance of the city (you can see the Empire State Building from White Plains—so not too long an arc of metaphorical saliva), I was playing catch-up with New York. Now that I was one of its residents, I sought out the best bagels and pizza and shoe-repair places. I took the M4 up to the Cloisters to see the tapestries, so far up I was the only one on the bus except for Sigourney Weaver and her kids, who sat quietly in the back, wearing black sunglasses and sharing a soft pretzel. I bought the most expensive and ugliest dress I had ever seen at the old Patricia Field’s on Eighth Street. I wore it to a Saint A’s formal, where I drank too many vodka tonics and stole a bottle of liquid soap for no good reason. I knew the one palm reader in Chinatown who could actually tell me my future. Gone were the days of finger origami and Coke cans. My lifeline is long and my money and love lines are broken, and thus I will likely become a drunken hobo and die alone. Which sounds about right.

  I took women’s studies classes at Barnard, which were at once strangely empowering and completely useless. Every student’s spin on feminist theory was left unchecked, thrown into some pot of higher learning, the bland mixture then poured back into our professor’s dissertation. Every paragraph was read twice before you realized you had already read it. Even when a piece of understanding could be shaken out, it seemed to float away in a sea of “ethical gender systems.” It was like panning for gold on the moon. Shake, shake, oh! There’s one. And there it goes.... But I loved it because I was in New York. I had urban bulimia—I wanted to gobble up the city so I could throw it back up as quickly as possible and start over.

  To cap off my immersion, I took an urban anthropology class. For our final exam, we had to do “fieldwork.” Successful projects of years past had included interviewing MTA officials and especially hostile homeless people. I decided to employ the lessons of my women’s studies class and my general wonderment of the city to
explore the cross-socioeconomic behavioral patterns of women’s lavatories.

  There’s a very limited amount of things one can do in the bathroom while still operating within the bounds of normalcy. I will go ahead and tell you that skulking for hours on end with a notebook under your arm, periodically setting off the automated hand dryer, is not one of those things. More than once I stood by as women shook water from their hands, waiting for me to hand them a paper towel. Occasionally, I obliged.

  This behavior mostly occurred in the more posh bathrooms. The bathroom at Henri Bendel, for example, didn’t have stalls but individual rooms with walls that went straight to the floor. The doors to these rooms were expertly rounded, the kind you imagine Alice passing through on her way to Wonderland. The “ladies’ lounge” even had an upholstered bench for me to sit on while taking notes. It’s funny what rich people will tell you. During the middle of the day on Fifth Avenue, when the trophy wives come out to play, they feel compelled to connect. At one point a blonde in her late thirties for which the word “statuesque” was invented emerged from one of Bendel’s gilded rabbit holes. She was rearranging her bangs in the mirror when she abruptly turned to me.

  “Can I show you something?” She leaned in quizzically. She tilted her head and blinked rapidly, as the python dyed purple for her bag might have done in its better days. At first I did not realize she was addressing me. It was as if I was painting a still life, so obsessed with capturing the sheen on an apple that I didn’t notice it had walked out of the bowl and started speaking.

  “Sure.” I slid my pen into the spiral binding of my notebook and walked over to the paper towel dispenser.

  “No, over here.” She gestured, pulling me in.

  “Lend me this?” She rested her hand on my shoulder without waiting for a reply. With her other hand she removed her heel to reveal a set of mangled toes. Toes so welt-covered and deformed, they looked as if they’d been grafted from a cadaver onto her otherwise perfect body. The pinkie toe, most innocent of appendages, was in especially bad shape.