Astonish Me. Maggie Shipstead

know that,” she said, sharply again. She was not as meek as she had first appeared, and he liked her more for it. “It only matters how you look.”

      “That’s not true,” he ventured after a moment, “in the big picture.”

      He was afraid he might have offended her, or that she would think he was an annoying goody-goody, but she made a wry face. “I mean in ballet,” she said. “Which is my big picture.”

      They fell into separate groups of friends—Joan’s smallness and prettiness and docility made her popular—but they chatted by their lockers and greeted each other in the halls. Their houses were not far apart, and sometimes they walked together. The ballet studio was on the way to Jacob’s house, and when he didn’t have baseball, he escorted her there, carrying her dance bag. He never went inside, and, in his imagination, the unassuming little storefront was a cloistered place of rites and mysteries. Sheer white curtains covered its front windows, and through them he caught vague, gauzy glimpses of girls in black leotards.

      “Is that your brother?” Jacob heard one of Joan’s friends ask in the lunchroom.

      “Basically,” Joan replied, and he felt both honored and insulted.

      Her nerviness and discipline appealed to him, and he felt protective of her in a way that seemed adult and masculine and new. As the younger brother of two bossy sisters, he was used to being clucked over by girls, but Joan seemed to trust that he could take care of himself and also, as needed, her. He understood that this was a role worth cultivating. Her mother was single and worked and didn’t understand ballet or Joan. Joan’s dance teacher, Madame Tchishkoff, was of the formidable, exacting variety and offered little beyond unyielding rigor and the motivational power of perpetual, implacable disappointment. Joan’s school friends were the kind of pretty girls who clumped together to assert their collective prettiness. They were companions and accessories, not confidantes.

      When Joan was lonely or distressed, it was Jacob she called, and he would take the phone from his scowling mother and retreat into the pantry, closing the flimsy door over the cord, gazing idly at the cans of soup and boxes of crackers while he listened. On the rare afternoons she didn’t have ballet, she summoned him to watch TV and help her with her homework at her house, which was always too dark and didn’t seem to have enough furniture and so felt like a hideout. Jacob’s mother would not allow a television in the house, nor did she approve of Joan’s lack of supervision or of friendships between boys and girls, and so he told her he was staying late at school.

      Joan trusted him with her darkest secret, which was that she had not only found her mother’s diaphragm but become obsessed with checking its presence in the bathroom drawer against what her mother said she was doing on a given night and the sometimes contradictory information offered by her Filofax.

      “See?” she said to Jacob once, having dragged him into the bathroom and opened a drawer with great portentousness, as though revealing the entrance to an Egyptian tomb. He saw cotton balls and shiny makeup compacts, emery boards, nail scissors with handles in the shape of a bird. “It’s gone.”

      “Okay,” he said, baffled by both her emotions and the workings of a diaphragm.

      “She’s doing it!” Joan told him, near tears. “With that man! His name is Rick! He works in her office.”

      To Jacob, this was not information to be cried over but rather to be filed away for later consideration. Joan’s mother was a thin, brusque woman who wore neat suits and pinned her hair in elaborate updos, the mechanics of which eluded him.

      “Don’t worry,” he said. He closed the drawer. Joan stared desolately at its white-painted face, its little ceramic knob in the shape of a rosebud. “It doesn’t have to bother you.”

      He wished he could think of something less dumb to say, less helpless, but she nodded and folded her arms over her chest. “It feels better just to show you,” she said. “But promise you won’t tell anyone.”

      He realized, with a flush of gratitude, that her standards for wisdom were pathetically low. He patted her shoulder. “I won’t.”

      He liked her delicate, feline face, her long, wispy hair, her narrow hips, her duck-footed walk, the gap between the tops of her thighs when she was in tights, her small, bony hands. If his sister Marion would drive him and not tell their mother, he went to Joan’s recitals, and he liked the way she was willing to stand onstage and be looked at. Eventually, March of sophomore year, when he finally actually turned fourteen, he confessed his age, and by then they were too close for her to make much of a fuss, although he thought he detected a new and faintly patronizing undertone in the way she spoke to him, especially about her dates, which were as frequent as her ballet schedule would allow and, he gathered, relatively chaste. She seemed more interested in the public victory of securing the attention of popular and athletic boys than the private encounters that might follow.

      “I can tell you anything,” she told Jacob often, which, to him, sounded less like a compliment than a command, the way his father said, You’ll make this family proud. Her confessional openness struck him, sometimes, less as a sign of intimacy between them than a smoke screen meant to keep him at a distance. She would chatter on, telling him how Barry Sauerland had offended her at the winter formal by implying that she was not his first-choice date or how Floyd Bishop had called her an icicle. She never seemed to notice that Jacob did not reciprocate her confidences, or not exactly. He confided in her about his father’s distant rigidity and his mother’s suffocating rigidity and about their clockwork marriage that, on rare occasions of malfunction, caused both to go wild with rage. But he did not talk to Joan about girls, even though he took dates to dances and sometimes to the movies, disguising his lack of a driver’s license as a lack of a car.

      Just before graduation, Joan tore a ligament in her foot. She had been slated to dance in a student performance in New York, where she would be seen by the directors of companies there and from San Francisco and Chicago and everywhere, she said, but now she could only lie around her house with her foot in a cast, paralyzed with fear that she would not heal, that she would miss her chance.

      “Let’s go to the beach,” Jacob said on a hot Saturday. Joan was lying on the couch with her cast propped up on a pillow, and he was sitting on the floor beside her, absently digging his fingers into the jungley olive-green pile of the carpet while they watched American Bandstand. “This is getting depressing.”

      Track was over; he was officially going to Georgetown, was officially the valedictorian, could relax for the first time in his life, and his big reward was to be pressed into constant service as Joan’s footman in her mother’s austere, gloomy den. At first, he had been eager to spend long, unsupervised hours indoors with Joan, but she was so morose that it seemed inappropriate to persist in the hope that they would finally make out, if only to dispel the boredom. Instead he made sandwiches for her that she didn’t eat, poured Tab over ice, changed the channel at her bidding, and waited for the unseen filaments of her ligament to knit themselves back together. Even Joan’s mother, off for the weekend with one of Rick’s successors, was having more fun.

      “I can’t go to the beach,” she snapped, pointing at her cast. “Remember?”

      “You don’t have to go in the water. Let’s just get out of here. My mom will let me take the car. She’s so happy I’m leaving soon.”

      “I’ll get sand in my cast.”

      “We’ll put a bag over it.” An idea struck him. “I’ll carry you.”

      She looked skeptical.

      “I’ll put you down on a towel, and you can just lie there. It’ll be almost as good as lying on the couch all day. You’ll love it.”

      “You’re not that strong.”

      “You don’t weigh anything.” He was not entirely certain he could carry her all the way from the car to the beach, but he was willing to try. Her injury made her more approachable, somehow. Not that he was afraid of her. He was just aware