If You're Lucky, This Could Be You: New Fiction by Sara Lippmann
Brittany tells Shania to come to yoga. You better fucking be there are her words. Since she got clean and Zen she is on her sisterly high horse. It is hell.
Don’t be late, bitch, she says handing Shania a banana. It’s for your own damn good.
The school bus takes forever but her dad’s either sleeping or out with the truck, so she shoves her slipper socks into boots and walks the half mile down River to Main Street. The sun is bright and the day is cold, but Shania’s used to the sting. Her breath looks like smoke, nothing clever, but she holds it for as long as she can, her exhale always shallower than her intake. The clock at the credit union (America First!) reads three degrees Fahrenheit, minus sixteen Celsius, which is like screw world peace: we can’t even agree on how to measure air. The book shop has closed, as has the crystal beading café, but the Great Wall of China is always empty and open. Rings ice her hands, ankhs and turquoise moons, studs punched from lobe to cartilage. She piles on all the jewelry she owns at once even though it discolors her skin. Her fingers are pink as runts by the time the bus slows and flips its arm, not that there is any traffic. School is on School Street, down the road from the Mountain Wellness Spa, whose kale-eating, soul-seeking clients keep the whole town afloat.
Her mom did housekeeping until Brittany took over, until she got busted, but Mountain Wellness believes in second chances. Thanks to their outreach initiative, Brittany has been to rehab, been through yoga and mindfulness training, and moved to kitchen staff, where she spends her mornings dicing carrots and deboning poached chicken for slaw. Certification hours complete, she’s been given her first teaching class, a gentle vinyasa on Thursdays, open to the public and not just guests in their spandex and fur boots. All week Brittany has been slamming her gong in preparation. At 22, her life is on the up and up.
School’s fine, whatever. Shania is in ninth grade and likes art, likes building stuff from a picture in her head. When she designed a napkin holder in cut-out sheet metal, her father called her a girl after his heart; said, maybe next time you can make something more practical, but they’re no longer allowed to do ashtrays. She likes drawing, too; she draws on her jeans and shoes, doodles concentric shapes that inevitably look phallic or vaginal, sparrows and squirrels and brook trout, shingles of scales. Sometimes she wishes she had more imagination, wishes she could design a fantastical, outer space dreamscape in which to lose herself, but Shania never strays much from reality. Brit’s boyfriend Duck Creeley once told her she was real good, like tattoo-level, but he was high at the time, and Brit said the moron wouldn’t know truth if it ran through his veins, and go wash your face, ink’s smudged all over your chin.
It’s Black History Month so Ms. Tibbs has decorations on the wall of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, the illustrations scalloped at the border like postage stamps, eyes fixed on the middle distance. Shania can count on fingers the number of Black people she’s seen here in Northern Vermont. She doesn’t get how anyone could embalm themselves in such calm, least of all those fighting injustice, which may be the point: they didn’t choose their images. Rage till you’re blue and still your story gets usurped and rewritten by those in power. Ms. Tibbs dims the lights, presses play. It’s the same each year. When Martin Luther King Jr.’s voice rings out I have a dream, half the class lowers their heads down on desks.
Out the window it’s started snowing, and the plow’s coming through, emergency lights flashing and beeping as it scrapes and reverses, reverses and scrapes, dropping a trail of rock salt. Tonight she and Brit will share the bed by the space heater, which blows loud as a hand vac, splitting her lips, but it’s the only spot of warmth against the wind. We will never be satisfied, King says, and Ms. Tibbs pauses the tape to say, Repetition is an effective rhetorical strategy. In her own life, Shania has seen the same things said and done over and over and it doesn’t seem to persuade anyone to be better. It snows all goddamn day. From afar the flakes looks fluffy and white, but up close the perspective changes. Up close the snow is heavy and gray.
Her mother died from snow. One thing leads to another. Skiing six years ago, not that she had any business skiing, but she’d been in one of her states at the time, getting loaded and knocking off work and leaving them to fend for themselves. Her mom loved that phrase, like her family was a pack of scavengers. Be creative, she’d say. You’ll come up with something. Shania was in 3rd grade and came up with omelets and canned hash for dinner. Brit was a junior and came up with booze. Her family was a seesaw. Her dad sank when her mom went flying. Cash Mitchell was a family friend. Cash took her to the hand-crafted brew pubs and farm-to-table tourists traps, rode her around the slopes in his Sno-Cat grooming bumps to smooth corduroy, her mom coming home as Shania was waking, cheeks flushed and alive. Aren’t you bored out there, Shania asked and her mom said, We play music, there’s heat in the cab, always the chance of a mountain lion. Can you imagine how lonely Cash would be without company? Later in the season, once the base softened and select trails were lit for night skiing, Cash was transferred to lift operation. Come on, Marie, he said, what good is life if you don’t risk it. First run and her mom caught the tip of her ski on a root sticking out from shoddy cover and snapped her femur clean. The injury, however, is not what killed her. What killed her is all her subsequent efforts to null the pain.
Occasionally in winter, their dad barrels in from wherever he’s been, pops a stew can on the stove like a cranberry mold, and says, Let’s build the world’s biggest fire. If Shania doesn’t set out for kindling, he’ll wield his axe through the back woods, which makes her nervous. Too many people around her have wielded dangerous things, hacking at the world like it was both too small and not big enough for them. So Shania spreads car blankets on the living room floor, and tells her dad they don’t need to light up anything. Come, she says, gently, as if he were a dog that’s strayed. Come inside, daddy. She waits. Shakes out Parcheesi, coaxes, I’ll beat your pants off, until eventually, he lumbers back in.
•
At lunch, the cafeteria lady hands her a ham and cheese and she sits at a corner table picking at it. Matt, Lacey, and Carlene sprawl out beside her, which allows her to disappear in their chatter. Mouths move but it’s all background noise. A bunch of seniors have been slurping a tray of vodka Jell-O somebody brought in and have gone feral, scooping up the slippery cubes of red flesh with their claws, sucking it down and howling. Billy Latham snorts gelatin through a straw and the table laughs, it’s so obvious, but lunch monitors do nothing about it. Billy gets away with everything. He’s got this white hot current running through him no one can resist. His brother is in prison and his sister is in prison and someday Billy will be in prison, too, but he lives out Shania’s way and if he sees her waiting for the bus sometimes he’ll give her a ride; other times he’ll drive right past her.
Billy’s in her math class because for all his electricity he’s not that bright. Ms. Meehan flirts with him like it’s a big joke, Billy being in algebra for the fourth time. Leans against the edge of her desk in her camel cable-knit turtleneck staring him down in their own private language, as if Billy’s already of age, which for all Shania knows, he may be. Ms. Meehan isn’t from Vermont, she’s a student teacher completing her masters up at the college. Like the rest of them, she’ll last through June, stock up on maple syrup then move on to Burlington or Boston, or strike gold with central New Jersey. Today Billy strolls into class chewing a gummy bear the color of champagne and Meehan says, Stop right there. She calls him Mister. Shania feels a twinge in her thighs watching them, Meehan’s suede boots lifting her to his chest height, chin to chin, like they’re squeezing a balance ball between them. I was not born yesterday. He shoots her a knowing grin. It’s just candy, he says. Cross my heart. Flashes his dimple and she sticks out her hip. It’s like they’re each playing a part, trying to impress the other, performing for the whole class. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. Billy says, How would you like to do it? Very hard? And Meehan shuts her eyes to keep from blushing, palm out, which is when Billy tosses the baggie into the room and Shania catches his stash and houses it.
She sucks off their sugar coating first. Granularity gives way to glycerin, a sweet glaze. Then she swallows the bodies. They are watermelon, bubble bath, a box of White Claw; they are a summertime party.
•
The bell rings. In study skills they’re practicing personal statements, Describe yourself in ten years, but Shania’s already written hers so she goes to the bathroom then out the double doors through the parking lot to the bus circle. Druggies wear Guatemalan fanny packs and smokers wear fingerless gloves but there’s plenty of overlap. Everyone shops at the same two stores. Shania throws on her hood and stands at the curb picking shake from her pockets as the snow lands fatly, waiting for the bears to kick in, feeling nothing and nothing and nothing and then feeling all too much.
When Billy pulls up in his truck, she gets in. She needs to be at Mountain Wellness by 4:30 but what is time. He asks her if she’s okay. She nods and her head rolls off her shoulders and under the seat, like that song her mom used to sing, on top of spaghetti all covered with cheese. A lost meatball, that’s what she is. That was dope what you did, Billy says, but language is lodged in her throat. When she reaches for words, they scatter and retreat, burrowing deeper until she’s leagues below, beyond retrieval. Her palms buzz, she can’t stop rubbing her thighs.
Didn’t know you were such a little bad ass, he says, ass slithering off his tongue, but here comes his hand clamping hers in his shell. Her fingers are hermit crab legs. She wiggles them. There are cat prints on her leggings. When he snaps them, they jump, the closest to a pet she’ll ever own, and it’s hilarious.
Subway takes all of five minutes. Trevor is working so he gives her a botched order, and she makes quick work of it, the meat is pink meat, and the bread expands inside her like a sponge. Trevor says, How’s your sister and Shania shrugs. She pulls a strand of hair from her mouth that got caught on the food. Trevor scratches his jaw. Tell her to come by sometime. There’s an open scab on his arm in need of attention. She nods at it but he doesn’t catch on. Blood, she thinks. Your inside is leaking out. Kind of like, Your epidermis is showing. Only she’s not saying any of it. When she steps outside, Billy says, What about me? Shania throws up her hands. Her hair’s in her face and she leaves it. You really must be wasted, he grins, clearing a swirl of mayo from her plump lip. She quenches her thirst on Mountain Dew. Frost coats the window like branches. Everything looks like something else. She presses her cheek to it. When she opens her eyes they’re in front of Duck Creeley’s barn.
Wait here, Billy says but Shania is not waiting in an ice cold truck. Billy’s gonna die, she can feel it. She should warn him, but boys like Billy do what they want. (Cash Mitchell’s consolation: We all die, kid.) She doesn’t want to get too close to the barn. Even with the windows boarded, the smell of Duck’s cooking hits her behind the teeth, plastic burning, so she opens the cab and walks off, her feet like poured Windex in the snow, gummies dissolving in slow release, one onto the next. She imagines them stretching and unfolding, opening inside her like Shrinky Dinks, like that Saturday morning cartoon. Instead of a bear with a cloud on her heart she is a cloud with bears in her belly. Only after she’s been on the road for a while does she realize she’s swinging Billy’s keys. Oh. Well. Decisions.
She adopts a stick, drags it through the snow, slush and gravel, looks up at the sky. Her PE teacher Mr. Reynolds introduced them to cloud appreciation. Reynolds flashed his International Cloud Society membership card to outright mockery. Someday, you’ll wish you belonged to something, he said. That fall, they lay on the track field, arms folded beneath their heads as the earth spun, trees bursting with color, clouds pretty as poodles, while Reynolds taught them cirrus, cumulus. At first it felt ridiculous, just watching, but then it was no more ridiculous than anything else. Lenticular: she’d known it from the Disney hologram puzzle her dad brought home from Good Will the year she turned eight.
But today is overcast. Today is too foggy to differentiate one cloud from the next.
Cars roll by. Shania counts then stops counting. She’s tired of walking but there’s no choice but to walk. The shoulder is a tightrope she teeters along, dipping one foot then the other, like any second the white line will curve out and she’ll slip, the ground falling away. The light is flat but if she keeps on she’ll hit the river, and from there, the distance will even out. She tells herself the feeling will pass like all other feelings, which sparks another song: Winston tastes good like a cigarette should, a clapping game her mom taught them, all the hand motions, thumbs at the ears: Ooohh aaah. Want a piece of pie. Her mom wore a yellow halter top in summer. Lipstick called Silver City Pink eroded to a sharp, iridescent nub. Her shoulder blades stuck out like wings. A hawk soars across the sky.
•
When she gets to yoga, Brittany is setting the mood with candles and incense. Did you get fucking lost? Brit seethes but Shania is winded, having run the last bit, her cheeks slapped, she still can’t answer. Well, at least you’re here. Grab a bolster, a blanket, grab whatever you need. Leave your shoes. Class is about to begin.
The yoga mat looks like a long blue tongue. Panting, Shania lies on it, waits for her body to still. The mat smells cunty, like a curled maxi pad left to wilt in a gym locker room. Around her lie ladies from Mountain Wellness, a few men, gray hair and ponytails, bowed, hairy knees. Brit’s supervisor wears genie pants that flap at the crotch like a pet door. The woman arranges herself on a meditation cushion tapping a notebook as if poised to keep score. Students warm up by grabbing their feet like babies, rocking from side to side. When they roll toward her, Shania feels them staring, feels them thinking they really let in e-v-e-r-y-o-n-e but she is no mind reader. For all she knows they’re not thinking of her at all. Everyone just thinks of themselves.
She rolls up. Picks a hangnail. Strokes her hair. It is long and thick and swings down her back like a horse. Brit envies it. Brittany is nothing special, which she offsets by calling attention to herself in other ways. Twenty tattoos she’s still paying off, from sharks to lightning bolts the size of King Triton, an iridescent Man of War menacing her lower back. Brit’s never been to the ocean. Fresh ink is close enough. Her mom also longed for sights unseen. Longed for that Cupid’s bow. Our little porn star, Brit said. At night, Shania cups her new breasts, and it’s a comfort, to hold herself like this, soft and warm, full of possibilities.
Life didn’t stop after her mom’s accident. Shania needed pencils, needed milk money, needed a ride. Brit never signed up for caretaker at 16, not like there was much caretaking going on beforehand. Life sucks the life from you, pushes you into certain lanes. Patterns repeat. Shania watched dolphins flip through the air on YouTube over and over again without a click prompt or reward. Maybe all behavior could be taught. Her dad stayed put. He used to play ball and fish the river but never ventured south of Windsor. All the country he needed was right here. Her mom’s scripts were a doctor’s order. Death, a mere casualty of conditioning.
Welcome to Flow, Brit says from the dais. She’s wearing a chocolate brown camisole with no bra, a tunnel of sweat running down her breastbone. Once Shania sees it she can’t stop seeing. Her gaze is a laser to her sister’s cleavage. When Brit was in a bad way she cleared out the cash from her dad’s toolbox and stole Shania’s unicorn sweatshirt, butchered the neck and sleeves. She got real skinny and fucked up her face, but recovery has wrought such buoyant magic upon her that now, even in her tenuous state, Brit radiates a hope that’s almost convincing.
The room is strung up in little white lights like the kind Mountain Wellness threads through its holiday privet. Brit leads them in breathing, three parts, nose and mouth, and Shania has to bite her lip to keep from snickering. The collective exhale is so loud it sounds fake. Brit has them close one nostril then the other like they’re playing the body recorder. All Shania can think of are vapor particles latching onto other particles. In elementary her class played Jailbreak on the hard-top. Eventually, the children all broke apart.
At 15, Shania has seen plenty of death. Barn accidents, thresher accidents, car accidents, freak accidents. Lang Boone choked on a hotdog. O.Ds, too many to track. Stasis could be a killer. But then, her mom died living free. Goes to show, her dad said, but never completed his thought. Shania doesn’t mind death, just protracted dying. If only her mom had gone on impact, boom, smack, into a tree.
•
The floors are heated, so nice. Shania stretches her arms off the mat, sweeping them along the wood like snow angels, shiny and smooth, she’ll never leave. She’ll sleep here in the studio of Mountain Wellness, bask in the golden light, the smells of pine and orange soda. After class, Brit will take her to the back where there’s an electric kettle and they’ll break ramen and curl up on Mexican blankets, shower in the spa bathroom with its everlasting supply of lotions and soaps. She’d do it, too, if it weren’t for her dad: move in like that pregnant teen in a big box bathroom, hide and wait, and allow herself to become some rich lady’s charity case.
In the past she’s come home to gas leaching from the stove, the whole room reeking like eggs, someone having forgotten to shut the pilot. Close call, but a call nonetheless. Shania relied on the law of probability: like, she couldn’t lose her mom and blow up her home in the same year, but apparently, she could lose her mom, her dad could lose his job, and they could both nearly lose her junked-up sister, though that was pushing it. Only so much a character can bear, but her life is not a goddamn movie. How’s this for plot? Fires erupt when people aren’t paying attention. The space heater, with its meager promise, melted everything in its path. Amber bottles into warped clocks, like the Salvador Dali poster in the art classroom, the photos she’d seen of Zion National Park. Someday, Shania will make it to Utah. Even Brit said, You need a trip, daddy, when she stopped using. Where am I going, muffin? He answered, then went to the bar or sat at the trailhead or parked on the tracks and listened for the once daily rumble of train.
Set an intention, her sister instructs. Bring hands to heart center. Says it like that, and it takes Shania a minute to figure out what’s wrong with her speech. Why does her sister sound so funny? Like Yoda. Shania can’t stop fixating on it until she realizes: Brit’s lopped off the articles. Why isn’t anyone correcting her? Hand to foot, elbow on knee, ribs stacked on knee, left hand on right thigh, like she’s playing Twister in the den and it’s her mom’s birthday and someone spilled the punch and someone else, Uncle Mick, is reaching through Brit’s legs, and everyone looks square at his hands then twists the other way.
But she’s got to give it to her. When Brit says stand (rise in mountain, is what she says) the yogis stand and Shania wishes she knew what it was like to have people listen to her. Brit is like Billy in that way, commanding the whole room with her swan folds, her up and down dogs. Her body moves with a driven grace, and Shania tries to keep up, but Brit is fast, Shania’s socks are slipping, and the Subway sandwich is burbling around, so she punks out, flays on all fours like a splat ball from the Dollar General, a calf on unused legs.
The poses keep coming. Brit dives; they dive. When Brit shape shifts into a camel, a pigeon, a Goddess, a warrior, the Mountain Wellness people follow in kind, regarding Brit with an awe saved for celebrities, like she’s never been jailed for possession. Brit has a tattoo of water nymphs on the ball of her left shoulder; the artwork skillful, intricate and indigo. Shania doubts she could top that.
Now Brit deserts her dais to circle the room, offering adjustments and modifications. Students relax into her hands, sighing heavily, her touch a salve for their ills. Her spine is so straight it’s like someone is pulling a string from her crown. She hisses into Shania’s ear. You’re an embarrassment. Can’t you at least try?
Once upon a time Shania could stuff her foot in her mouth and gnaw the calluses around her big toe but she hasn’t been that flexible in ages. She swallows a fleck of skin on her thumb, bad habit, teachers have sent her to the nurse for pica, but each time she was dismissed with a Dixie cup of ice. Truth is, plenty of people ate far worse. In front of her a man bridges out with a beard mossed like Cash Mitchell, Grateful Dead t-shirt, pelvis thrust like a saber toward the ceiling. Billy Latham was going to goddamn kill her for walking away with his keys. Punish her good and then what. Move onto somebody else.
Pay attention, Brit says. If you’re lucky, this could be you.
•
Last summer, Shania had a job distributing towels at the Wellness pool. Guests wanted extra even as they claimed to give a shit about the environment, the lush green hills, the sunrise views. It’s like living at the top of the world, they said, and she smiled, patted the hot, quilted terry. Or the edge of it, they whispered, sandals thwacking. Can you imagine the desolation of this place in winter?
Out the window, it’s already dark. When Brittany offers the option to hang out in child’s pose, Shania takes it, her stomach flopping onto her thighs. How much more snow? How would he do it, Billy? She feels queasy, like the room is spinning or she is spinning around the room. She doesn’t know which. Maybe she’s just sobering up. Sometimes, she still dreams of her mother. Her smell, like meatballs, garlicky fingers; her scratchy, below-the-surface laugh. On cold nights, she’d put their socks in the oven so they’d wake up to something loving and warm.
In lotus position, Brittany sits with a purple velvet book in her lap, poetry, or some Bible of spells. Like her sister’s ever opened a book. Savasana may mean Corpse Pose, but I like to think of it as a letting go to make room for the new. Rid yourself of the dead, Brit says. Lie down. Lying Shania can do. Brit raises her gong. As the sound echoes through you, inhale all that beauty and knowledge; exhale the clarity you’ve gained.
