The next Saturday Jed’s dad decided to stay home. He sent Jed over to LJ’s. LJ’s mom was quiet. Her face glowed lightly with make-up. They had bok choy with garlic sauce, broiled zucchini, and smoothies. LJ’s mom had set up a table in the driveway, and that’s where they ate. LJ had one piece of zucchini and she put some garlic sauce on it. She was full after that. She couldn’t finish her peach smoothie and was a little embarrassed. “It’s okay,” LJ’s mom said, and petted LJ’s head. After eating, they watched Titanic, the recent remake of it, animated and not so epic, from the point-of-view of an indignant family of bottom-dwelling fish, made further indignant by the leveling of their known world by the Titanic. Jed went home and LJ went to sleep. LJ’s mom cleaned up. She watched Titanic again, wept briefly at the end — where the father fish is mutilated by a plastic six-pack ring — and then went across the street, to her other house.
She hadn’t furnished it yet. The electricity wasn’t working. It was dark and warm and she went soberly through each of the rooms, then upstairs. She took off her sandals. The carpet was nice and thick and soft. “House two,” she said to her feet. It amused her only a little to own two houses. Not nearly enough, she felt. It should amuse her more. She went to a window, looked across the street at her other house. She watched her own front door. She wanted to see herself come out from there, come skipping across the street; wanted to see what she looked like from above; and wanted, then, to meet herself on the stairs — surprise herself — and give herself a hug. “Susan,” she shouted. “Susan Anne Michaels! What are you doing …” She turned and looked at the room she was in. She did a cartwheel across it, into a sit, and sat there, Indian-style. Through the window she could see the space-dried clay of the moon, blanched as deep white space, blemished as a coin. She stood and went downstairs. She heard some noises, became frightened, and then ran home, to her other house.
She lay on her gigantic bed, stomach-down and splay-limbed. She felt plain. She thought of getting drunk or something. Maybe she should dye her hair. She began to adjust the hardness of her mattress; she had bought one of those mattresses. There was a fact out there, she felt, that she didn’t know. This was a fact that you had to know in order to live. There was a knowing to being alive, and she just didn’t know. She closed her eyes, listened to the little mattress motor, working hard, and began to think on her life, tracing it forward and back in a squiggled, redundant way. She thought, without much conviction, that if she concentrated hard enough, if she started, carefully, in her childhood and moved forward, gaining momentum, then when she reached the present moment she might be able to turn it, her life, like a pipe cleaner, might be able to twist it, attitudinally, in some new and pleasant direction.
“Well do it then,” she said loudly, in her head.
She would have to start with her first memory. It was a photo of herself, a tiny girl. Her next memory was of being embarrassed — her face red, the world terrible. She moved on. She needed momentum. She couldn’t focus on anything, so she skipped to tonight, to watching Titanic. She went through the movie, went through going to her house across the street, and then thought of what she was doing one minute ago — she was going through Titanic. She began to go through that again. She got confused. She thought of the moment immediately before the present, the confusion, thought of the present, and then thought forcefully ahead. Things got blank. She felt herself lying on the bed.
In the morning Jed went back to LJ’s.
LJ’s mom set two bowls of cereal and soy milk on the counter. She went into the living room, picked up a book, and stood reading in front of the TV.
In the kitchen, Jed and LJ went for pop tarts. LJ licked hers, the frosted front of it. Jed bit his. They watched each other while eating. LJ’s tongue was small and pink, like a puppy’s.
“Listen to this,” LJ’s mom said from the living room. She read aloud from her book. “ ‘Rather than using two dolls to play “dollies have tea,” an autistic child might take the arm off one doll and simply pass it back and forth between her own hands.’ ”
Jed looked at LJ. She was very beautiful. In bed sometimes Jed would be thinking, Lewly J, and he wouldn’t be able to sleep. He would sit and fluff his pillow and smooth his blanket. Sometimes he wanted badly to hold her. He’d move close to her and his insides would start going faster, everything spilling and cold against his bones and organs. He wondered sometimes if he had special powers, like the X-men. Not everyone was the same, Jed knew.
LJ heard in her head the unsquidlike noise from her dream. It was abrupt and bovine, and it startled her. She dropped her pop tart. She picked it up. The pop tart was beginning to wetly bend. She wasn’t hungry, she knew. She was never hungry for breakfast or for lunch. It always took until dinner for her to get hungry. She blushed. She put the pop tart in the sink and used a spatula to shove it down the drain.
Jed wandered away, into some other room — the piano room — wanting LJ to follow. Chopin, Jed thought. Chopin was about five feet tall. His head was very big. Jed knew Chopin from his dad. His dad for some time had been obsessed with both Chopin and Glenn Gould. Jed once asked who would win in a fight, Chopin or Glenn Gould. His dad had said it would take three Chopin’s to beat up Glenn Gould. Jed liked Chopin.
LJ followed slowly into the piano room. She was thinking about when she had gotten a thin Chinese noodle accidentally inside of her head, up through her sinuses, out through a space below her eye. Her mom had pulled it out and then everything was okay.
“Let’s go to the church,” Jed said.
“Okay,” LJ said. She was grinning. She ran and pushed Jed and Jed fell on the carpet. Jed stood and went to push LJ, but didn’t know where on her body to. She was very small. Her head was wispy. It seemed almost invisible.
LJ screamed, a bit quietly, “We’re going out!”
She had trouble opening the front door. Jed helped.
Outside, it was dewy and warm. LJ felt momentarily underwater, then as if in a sweltering place, a jungle or Africa. She looked around, unsure of things. “What if I climbed this tree?” she said. There was a tree, and they looked at it.
“It looks hard to,” Jed said after a while.
“I’m not sure if I should,” LJ said. She felt strange. For a moment it seemed to her that the day was already over — she was in bed, asleep, and then it was the next day and now here she was again. “Oh,” she said.
They began walking. There was an empty lot where you could climb the neighborhood wall, on the other side of which was a fort built by some older kids and then a field, with a church and a McDonald’s on it. They saw Jason, who had a green apple and was eating it. Jason was one grade more than them. “Where are you going?” Jason asked LJ. He looked at Jed.
“The church,” Jed said.
Jason turned around and walked with them, adjacent LJ. He was tall. “Do you like me?” he said loudly to LJ. Someone had once told LJ that if asked, if given the choice, you were always to say yes. Probably her mom had said that. Her mom had said that if things ever got too bad it was okay to do drugs, as long as you kept reading Chuang Tzu the entire time. After she said that she had looked very worried.
“Yes,” LJ said. She had the word insalubrious going through her head. She didn’t know what it meant. Things were always going through her head like this. Things going through her head, herself going through the world; sometimes she got confused. She felt sleepy.
Jed saw in his periphery that Jason was holding LJ’s hand. He thought that he should have held LJ’s hand first, when they left the house; he was always too slow. But he wasn’t the kind of person to make others uncomfortable, he knew. He felt good about that. But it was a tiny feeling, and not altogether a good one either.