White Fur Read online

  At the store, she cranks the heat.

  She’s going to call her mother, because it’s time. And she finally has herself staked in this new territory, and it’s safe to reach back toward home.

  Seven months have passed since she talked to her family, and since then, she’s slept on more than a couple subways overnight, eaten chop suey dregs and pizza crusts from dumpsters, hung out with a fifteen-year-old from Memphis who was living with his leashed ferret in a church basement, and let a man take her into a loan office and jack off to the sight of her pussy—she pulled her jeans halfway down and he wasn’t allowed to touch—for twenty dollars. And that’s the tip of the iceberg.

  “Hey, Ma,” she says.

  “Elise! How you doing.” To Angel: “It’s Elise. Jesus Mary, Elise.”

  “What’s going on there, Ma?”

  “We’re watching television. You ain’t missing nothing. Where you calling from? Someplace warm, I hope? Tell me you’re in Florida, baby girl. Tell me everything’s sunny and good.”

  “New Haven. I didn’t get far. Can’t really talk long either, Ma, just want to check in.”

  “Are you not gonna tell us where you’re at?” Denise protests hoarsely.

  “I’m in New Haven, Ma.”

  “Elise, come on.” Snap and whoosh of a Bic lighter.

  “I’m getting settled. I’ll tell you when I tell you. What’s going on there?”

  “Nothing. Everything.” Big drag, exhale. “But I mean, at least it’s the weekend now, so.”

  Elise fiddles with the desk drawer handle. “Yeah. It is the weekend.”

  “I got them unicorns you mailed me. I started looking forward to it each month, getting a little package from you.”

  “Yeah? I’m glad you like them.”

  “You not going to tell me why you left and didn’t say nothing?”

  “Ma. I’m twenty years old.”

  “Lise, if you was forty-two I’d expect you to say something.”

  “I guess I don’t know. You guys didn’t do nothing wrong,” she lies.

  “Well. At least you calling us now. Don’t forget me.”

  “I won’t.”

  Drag and exhale. “It’s okay, baby girl.”

  “I love you,” Elise says, trying to control her voice.

  “I love you to pieces,” her mother returns.

  Denise asks her to come home for Cori’s sixth birthday.

  “I can’t, Ma.”

  “Why not? Come back for two days. We’re having a party.”

  “I got something going on here,” Elise says shyly.

  “Oh, really,” her mother says with a smile Elise can hear.

  Fuck! Elise feels a panic of lovesickness. She misses her mama.

  They say goodbye, and she sits in the stockroom, bent over on a stepladder, among metal shelves of fish food and empty tanks, and tries to breathe.

  Elise thinks of Denise’s laugh cracking like thunder over the Turnbull houses, the paprika in her chili, the way her bra cuts into her back, the powdery heat of her body when they’d lie on the bed in the summertime, the afternoon too hot for anything but gossip and game shows. Her mother played with Elise’s hair like it was her own, absentmindedly twirling it as they smoked.

  Denise looks like a white-trash Swiss Miss: blond with a jolly face corrupted by cigarettes and methadone.

  She had Elise at sixteen, and gave a teenager’s violent tenderness to her baby. Their bond is ironclad. She named her Elise so their names would rhyme. They wore matching pink tracksuits when Elise was a kid.

  Of course, her mother also misses Elise doing dishes, buying diapers and Kool-Aid with her own paycheck, watching whatever orphaned children ended up at the apartment, cleaning when case workers were due, sewing torn clothes.

  And most important—going down the street for daily lotto tickets.

  Elise thinks of the apartment: roach shit, a defunct fridge in the window to block stray bullets, and leftover Christmas decorations shedding glitter on the floor. Someone’s black-eyed toddler sick and sleeping on the couch.

  I pulled the short straw, so what, Denise likes to say, about anything in her life: men, money, health.

  And she is beat up. She lashes out in inefficient ways. Like she doesn’t dump the garbage if she’s overworked, living with the smell just to get the family miserable. Elise remembers more than once the can moving with maggots. Her mom believes in love. Angel broke her ribs, and sold her TV, but they have that thing, the fire that goes out and comes back from the smallest cinder, the flame of god. Denise will not give him up because her world would turn completely cold. You got to let it go, Elise thinks now. It’s not your life. Let her go.

  Early morning—the sky is lustrous like a pearl, and cruel with dampness. Matt and Jamey get into the BMW and wait for it to warm up.

  “So you did drop that girl off the other night,” Matt says. “Abigail saw.”

  “Abigail saw? Are we in junior high?” Jamey flicks cold eyes at his friend.

  “But I mean—you did.”

  “Yeah. Took her to dinner to make up for, you know, the incident.”

  “Huh.”

  The heat roars.

  Matt wants to say something else. “She freaks me out, dude.”

  “Why?”

  “Well. She’s a hustler, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know.” Jamey blows into his Purdey gloves of copper-brown leather.

  “You’re nice to her because you feel guilty. Correct?”

  Jamey shrugs.

  “Don’t you think she knows that?” Matt presses, looking at Jamey who just looks at the ice-crusted windshield. “Don’t you think she’s counting on that?”

  “So she’s to blame for you pushing her?”

  “I barely touched her! How else could someone in my place react?”

  “There’s lots of ways someone could react.”

  “She’s a townie,” Matt observes.

  “She’s not even from here.”

  “Wherever she’s from, she’s a townie there.”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Um, she looks like she didn’t finish high school and is casing our house as we speak.”

  Without answering, Jamey steps out and rakes ice off the windshield.

  Matt watches, the light in the car a frozen blue.

  Jamey gets back in, takes off his gloves, and puts his hands to the heat vent. Then he turns to Matt.

  “Anyway, you went out with that girl Beth.”

  “Brenda? From Port Jefferson? What does that have to do with anything?”

  “She wasn’t from your social circle.”

  “You sound like my mother!”

  “You know what I’m saying.”

  “We went out for two weeks,” Matt says, unrelenting. “She gave the greatest hand job in Suffolk County.”

  Jamey stares out the window.

  Matt sighs. “I’m just looking out for you, man.”

  “Please don’t.” Jamey smiles.

  This makes Matt angry. “What, am I supposed to feel guilty because I have a great family, and we have money, and I got a really good education? Should I be miserable all my life because I got lucky? Sorry. I don’t feel guilty at all.”

  Jamey says nothing.

  “Dude,” Matt says, flustered and giving up. “I’m sick of your shit.”

  They drive to school over roads pitted with salt, mute.

  She watches from her window as the car drives away.

  Him and Matt—that’s no good. She has the urge to pry them apart, like photographs on album pages that got stuck together, the faces sealed.

  The cold is mean. Cheeks are red and raw, and hands hurt when they take up pens in the classrooms, knuckles thawing. Snow melts off a boot to watery mud on the marble floor.

  Jamey sits in a classroom, and his is the only desk to get an angle of sun. He resists closing his eyes. He can’t warm up. He pretends to stare at the professor. Dust moves a
round his head but barely; Jamey could be a photograph he’s so still. When the class is over, he leaves as if he just got there, as if he didn’t hear a thing.

  A mitten is half-sealed into a dirty snowbank outside the science building. When a bird shrieks, everything that already felt fragile suddenly feels broken.

  In the dining hall, he sits with Matt and friends, pretending to listen to their Gorbachev debate.

  Amber pendant lights, blue curtains, mashed potato on blue-rimmed plates, wood walls, ginger ale—Jamey holds on to the table like someone on a stormy sailboat.

  Because he’s watching Matt (collar popped, jaw set, leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed).

  I don’t like my best friend anymore, Jamey understands, and actually tears up.

  Matt watches the debate. He always gauges how an argument will lean before choosing a side. His French-blue cashmere sweater is new; Jamey’s never seen it. That’s how well they know each other.

  Growing up, Matt gave Jamey the birthday gift Matt wanted for himself, dragging his nanny to FAO Schwarz; Jamey did the same. A toy Ferrari to pedal in circles around your bedroom! A Japanese robot whose chest shoots real sparks! The most extravagant water gun the world has ever known!

  Matt recently decided to be an investment banker. He wants to ski triple black diamonds at Vail. He wants a loft in SoHo. He wants to marry a supermodel. He wants a Rhodesian ridgeback, like the one some cowboy bond trader brought to a party in Montauk last summer. He wants a sixty-foot sailboat like his dad, and he wants to win races in Jamaica, Newport, Antigua, and then he wants to do a victory sail with the boat full of supermodels and his Rhodesian ridgeback.

  Matt always had Jamey over because Jamey’s home was a ghost land, with the nanny-of-the-month drifting through rooms, and his father in Gstaad or London or Lyford Cay. The families lived on the same block—East Seventieth between Park and Madison—and were of the same social status: both dads were East Coast royalty but chose wives who knocked them down a peg, or skewed them sideways at least.

  Matt’s mother, Yasmin, is a megawatt beauty from an Iranian oil family. Matt acted out if she gave Jamey too much attention: Matt would spit food, fake-cry, slit his eyes in drastic boredom. She questioned the boys in an opulent accent about their day, the new Latin teacher at Buckley, the books they were reading. Her gold bracelet’s one charm clanged on the marble counter or the phone receiver.

  Matt’s sister was named Asha, and her room spun with mobiles and Madame Alexander dolls. A cave of glitter and porcelain and grosgrain. Her hamster, Rod Stewart, nibble-sucked the silver water pipe in his cage with blank eyes.

  Asha once stared at Jamey through dinner, then asked: Why are you always here anyway? Her parents shushed her. Matt hissed: “He’s like my brother that’s why, you stupid,” which is something he never said out loud before or since.

  The Danning apartment had things the Hydes’ did: a junk drawer of twine and batteries and menus; a linen closet that smelled of lavender sachets; a foyer table where mail collected; and a master bedroom the kids couldn’t enter. That wing was often empty at Jamey’s house but full of light at Matt’s. Jamey once got up to pee, and saw Matt’s mom and dad in the hall—she was in a robe, he was in boxers. The couple faced each other, and he tucked a wisp of black hair behind her ear before kissing her. Jamey felt like someone lit a Roman candle in his mouth and aimed it down into his soul.

  A blizzard is predicted, snowflakes cartwheeling across the TV screen all day as New England gets hysterical, waiting to see if it will come true.

  Robbie’s new boyfriend, Craig, wears a Metallica T-shirt tucked into jeans. He eats pistachios on the couch, delicately putting shells in the ashtray.

  Robbie and Elise grind to Grace Jones, “Slave to the Rhythm.”

  “Shake your boo-tays!” Craig yells out.

  Each time the song ends, they rewind the tape and play it again.

  “Wow,” Robbie says, and looks out the cold glass.

  Elise and Craig smile with him as the white crush of sky lands on the earth. Snowstorms are mortally gentle, a silence dropped from heaven to stifle houses and highways, factories, dumpsters, and statues and fences and motorcycles and bushes and sheds. Birds and squirrels and stray cats vanish into hiding places that seem preordained, since the disappearance is seamless and immediate.

  Next door, the guys watch CNN until the lights flicker and die.

  “Blackout!” Matt says, lighting a candle and grabbing a box of Triscuits. “Want some?”

  “Sure,” Jamey says.

  They sit in the dark and eat crackers but can’t think of much to talk about.

  Luckily, Jonas and Thalia knock on the door with a bottle of scotch.

  “Party time!” Thalia says throatily, unwrapping her plaid scarf, a veteran of Bermuda storms and Swiss Alps blizzards and heavy rains on private islands in Maine. “I told everyone to meet here. I love blackouts. So fun.”

  Later, Jamey sees silhouettes in the next-door yard.

  He gets up.

  “Got to piss,” he says in a ridiculously casual voice to the people gathered in his lightless living room.

  He sneaks out the door, toward Elise and two guys making snow angels.

  The trio freezes, then Elise, finishing the wings, clumsily sits up and smacks her hands together.

  The small guy takes charge. “Crazy storm, right?”

  “Totally,” Jamey says.

  The guy holds a plastic cup. “Making snow and syrup, man. You want to come upstairs?”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  Jamey walks over. Elise’s face is blotchy, and steam comes from her mouth. She wears white sweatpants and a rainbow sweater, tufted with snow.

  Jamey nods at Elise. “Hey,” he says.

  She grins and ducks, like someone with braces. “Hey.”

  “What’s going on,” he says, offering his hand to Robbie and Craig. “Jamey Hyde.”

  What am I, running for president? he thinks.

  They feel their way up the stairs, their footfalls especially loud in the darkness. In the apartment, Robbie pours Aunt Jemima into a cup of snow and hands it to Jamey.

  “Thanks,” he says.

  Jamey bristles with discomfort and desire, standing like an exclamation point—ramrod straight and perched on a dot.

  “You doing good?” Elise asks him.

  “Yeah, you?” he says.

  She nods, licks ice from her cup.

  Candlelight makes her eyes black.

  They all sit on pillows on the floor, telling blizzard and blackout and hurricane stories. Jamey hears himself guffaw and ask simple questions, and he’s reminded of his dad or some other middle-aged man talking to teenagers.

  But he won’t leave. Everyone can feel it, and it’s thrilling and freaky.

  “Why don’t we go for a little midnight walk!” Robbie says theatrically to Craig.

  Elise and Jamey sit there on the pillows, stranded. When she finally looks up, he’s staring. He’s dumb, gauche with lust. This makes her flush. She puts her mouth as close to his as she can while letting him be the one to start the kiss.

  And he kisses her.

  She takes him to the bedroom eventually, pulling up sweatpants unglamorously pushed halfway down her thighs, sweater around her neck.

  She’s taken his shirt off and unbuckled him, and he holds his pants closed as they walk hand in hand into the dark room.

  “Ouch,” he whispers, after stubbing his toe, and she nervously laughs with him.

  They sit on the bed, and she tosses her boots into the corner, where they land heavily. She pulls her sweater off and stands to step out of her pants. Sitting, he circles his arms around her hips and puts his cheek against her stomach, where blood beats like a drum.

  She moves his mouth down. He licks her, and she makes him stop, trembling, because she’s about to come.

  He looks up, bewildered, in the dark, for directions. She shakily leads him to take off his pants, and
lie down. Straddling him, she’s so swollen, he thinks he must be injuring her. But she eases down, then moves, slowly frantic and unstoppable, and they both come so hard it hurts.

  She lies next to him, on cold blankets that haven’t had time to warm up. She kisses his damp neck where the artery throbs.

  “I’ll do anything in the world for you,” she says quietly.

  Her hand spreads flat on his belly.

  And he hates her.

  He stays awake and sneaks out when dawn washes the room with a bisque-cream light. He tiptoes by Robbie’s open bedroom, sees dirty socks hanging out of the quilt.

  Later in the morning at his own house, Jamey yawns, makes tea on the gas stove, acting like nothing happened. Matt looks at his friend with dull hostility.

  “I almost called 911,” Matt says. “Why didn’t you just tell us you were going over there?”

  “I heard something outside,” he sputters, “and they invited me upstairs for a drink.”

  “Who’s they?” Matt says.

  “Elise, and her roommate, and his, you know, friend.”

  Jamey bounds up the stairs like a kid home from a first date.

  The blizzard takes days to plow, and classes start slowly.

  Jamey doesn’t go to her place that night, or the next night, and can barely sleep. He jacks off quickly and without ceremony because he has to.

  She’s eating Kentucky Fried Chicken in the living room, and she finds herself motionless, paralyzed, holding up a drumstick, unsure how long she’s been like this—lost in the dream. The room is dim; it’s become evening without her noticing. Elise can barely eat because her stomach is shrunk in obsession.

  Since their biorhythms are yoked, Jamey’s distraction, even though he’s not doing anything about it, is driving Matt insane.

  “You seem a little unfocused,” Matt says acidly.

  “What do you mean?” Jamey asks.

  Jamey’s extremely focused on those thighs, and hard tits, the way her kiss summons his blood and sends it gushing through his veins like a fucking river!