The Age of Miracles

19

At school, we dissected frogs, we ran the mile, our spines were checked for scoliosis. Soccer season stretched into January because of all the games we’d canceled in the fall. But I’d lost interest in the sport. What was the point anymore? What did it matter?

“But you like soccer, don’t you?” said my father as I sulked in the car on the way to practice one day. After my mother got sick, he had changed his schedule so that he could drive me.

“How do you know if I like it or not?” I said.

He turned toward me. I never talked to him that way, and he looked surprised. Outside, the sky was a fiery orange, a sunrise in the late afternoon.

“What’s going on with you lately?” he asked.

He looked tired. His hair, a pale brown, was beginning to thin at the edges. A layer of stubble had grown on his chin since the morning. I wondered if he sensed that I knew what he’d been doing with Sylvia.

“Nothing,” I said. “I just don’t want to do this anymore.”

My father didn’t answer. We continued driving toward the soccer field.

The main thing I remember about those afternoons at the field were the moments when the boys’ team would come jogging past our practice. We could hear the boys panting as they got close, the synchronized click of their cleats on the asphalt. We could smell the sweat of their jerseys as they passed. I’d always search the pack for Seth, who ran at the edge of the group near the front and never looked in our direction. The eyes of all the other boys usually fell on Michaela as they passed—and she received their attention with a wide-open smile. I never understood how she knew what they wanted. I avoided looking at the boys as they approached, until the sound of their footfalls faded and then went mute as they hit the dirt path at the edge of the field. That was when I’d take one last look at Seth before he and all the other boys disappeared into the eucalyptus trees dividing their field from ours.

We reached the parking lot, and my father pulled up to the curb.

“Listen to me,” he said. “You’re not quitting soccer.”

I stepped out of the car, my soccer bag swinging on my shoulder. I slammed the door.

The parking lot was a long way from the field, and I walked as slowly as possible. I could see Hanna’s skinny outline in the distance on the field. I hated the way our old closeness hung over us like a stink, unacknowledged but forever wafting in the air.

An idea flickered in my mind: I didn’t have to go to practice—I could just walk away.

My father had already driven off. No one else was nearby.

Maybe the slowing was affecting my emotions, too: I felt brave and impulsive that day. I began to move away from the field, first slowly and then faster, until soon I was rushing down the steep slope of a landscaped hill, ice plant crunching beneath my cleats.

I landed in the shopping-center parking lot that neighbored the field.

The first thing I saw was a health food store that catered to real-timers. It was late afternoon, but the store was just now opening its doors for the day, revealing its rows of vitamins, dried kale, and herbal sleep remedies.

Next door, people were pushing carts in and out of the giant drugstore I sometimes visited with my mother. They were running a special on survival gear: A giant stack of canned goods stood out front beneath a sign that read, IS YOUR FAMILY PREPARED?

I wandered inside, conscious of the sound of my cleats on the linoleum, as if they might give me away, but no one seemed to notice. I could hear the buzz of fluorescent lights, the watery classical music flowing from the speakers in the ceiling.

Whenever I came here with my mother, certain aisles felt a little illicit to me, and I was eager to explore them on my own. In the cosmetics aisle, fifty feet of shelving displayed in glittering packages all the powders and the polishes and the creams, the shimmer sticks and eyebrow pens, the tweezers and clippers and razors that, I had begun to suspect, if applied in the correct combinations, might begin to transform me into a girl more lovely and more loved.

At the far end of the cosmetics aisle, an older girl with perfectly straight black hair and car keys jingling in her hand was twisting open nail polishes and testing the colors on her nails. I remember the satisfying clink of the bottles against one another. I envied the casual way that she dropped the ones she liked into her basket.

Behind her, hanging from a circular rack, was a small selection of bras.

I was too embarrassed to approach the rack while she was there, so I wandered up and down the aisle for a while, picking up lipsticks and then dropping them back into place. When she was gone, I drifted toward the rack of bras. They had only five or six styles, and one seemed much nicer than the rest. I remember the way it looked hanging on the rack, a crisp bright white with blue polka dots and straps made of blue satin ribbon and tiny bows where the straps met the cups. When I was certain that no one was around, I held the bra up to my chest.

The tag said $8.99. I had my grandfather’s ten-dollar bill in my soccer bag.

When my father pulled up to the soccer field, I was sitting on the curb as usual, my soccer bag in my lap, the bra radiating from deep inside it. The other girls on my team were beginning to move toward the parking lot, small figures in the distance, pausing to stretch their legs or adjust their ponytails, sweaty from the drills I had missed.

I climbed quickly into the car.

“How was practice?” my father asked.

I was taking big gulps from my water bottle. Deception, like algebra, was a newly learned skill.

“Fine,” I said.

“What did you guys do?”

I worried that he knew. “We always do the exact same thing, Dad,” I said. “That’s why it’s so boring.”

Here was the most amazing thing about it: He believed me.

As soon as we were home, I closed myself in my bathroom. I had a fluttery feeling that something might be finally starting for me, that this might be a beginning. I felt all my worries—all the more important things—sliding swiftly away. I could already picture how the strap would look on my shoulder, poking out from under my shirt the way Michaela’s always did at school.

But when I tried it on, after struggling for many minutes with the clasp, I discovered that a terrible transformation had taken place between the drugstore and home: I had brought home a cheap and girlish bra. The satin ribbons were too blue and too shiny. One of the seams was already coming loose. Even worse was the way the cups rippled unsexily across my chest, like two empty water balloons waiting to be filled.

I heard my mother’s footsteps on the stairs.

“What are you doing in there?” she asked through the door.

Just her nearness in the hall made me nervous.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Are you sick?” she called. She had begun to worry that I would develop the syndrome, too. “Your father says you’ve been in there for almost half an hour.”

I could feel her wanting to open the door. I could feel her hand reaching for the knob. I unhooked the bra and threw on my shirt.

“I’m fine,” I called. “I’ll be out in a second.”

Later, when she was asleep and my father was at work, I buried the bra deep inside one of the trash cans in our side yard, so that no one would ever discover how little I understood what seemed so obvious to the other girls I knew.