No 1: A TAXONOMY OF LOVES

PHOTO BY LUCIA AUERBACH

REBECCA KOPELMAN

Two nights after you graduate high school, you come home to a girl around your age perched at the edge of your bed, rifling through your bedside table. For a moment, you are paralyzed, taking wide-eyed stock of her bare feet, her knobby knees, her lank, pale hair. Your hand is still resting on the doorknob, your parents at their house in the Cape (you’re to fly up and join them next week). 

Not that you need them here, not that you’re afraid, exactly: you doubt she poses any real danger to you–she seems to pose more of a general nuisance. She looks weak, like she would crumble if you held her too tightly.

“Hey,” you finally bark in a voice not entirely your own. Then, more quietly, “That’s mine.”

She looks up at you, blinking slowly, then turns her gangling body to face you. Her eyes are like a cow’s; long-lashed, wide, and empty. From this angle, you can see her distended belly, which balances atop her thin legs like a mattress on a bottle of wine. If she stands, you fear, she might tip over. Her white-blonde hair and eyebrows give her an alien, almost divine appearance–she seems puzzled by your earthly confusion.

Upon seeing that you have nothing else to say, she reclines on the bed, still fingering the contents of your nightstand.  “That’s mine,” you say again, as if that fact might have gained some unique meaning in the past few seconds. She nods slowly at you, like you’re a child struggling to grasp a comically basic concept. 

“I know,” she says, smiling indulgently and patting a spot next to her for you to sit, “I’m Lola.”

“Lola,” you repeat, looking for any significance in the name. “Is it short for anything?”

She shakes her head. “Just Lola. Come sit.” This girl, this stranger is so icily polite, so cool that you nearly forget that she’s intruded on you. “Wanna cig?” she asks, holding out a pack of American Spirits. Her fingers are red, nails raw.

You stand still. “Are those mine?” 

She shrugs and rolls her dark cow’s eyes at the question, then takes a lighter from your nightstand and gingerly places a cigarette between her chapped lips, shielding it from nonexistent wind with a narrow hand. 

You eye her stomach, which looks to be moving from the inside, looks to be alive beneath her threadbare t-shirt. You’ve heard of girls like her, girls like you, who let the wrong boy inside and end up swollen with an unwanted child. That’s the only way you can make sense of her mismatched form. “Are you supposed to be smoking?” you ask, more than a little passive aggressively.

“Is anybody?” 

“I mean, in your current state, isn’t it bad for...the baby?”

“What state? What baby?” There is no recognition in her face; the thought doesn’t even register. 

She is only able to muster fleeting sparks from the lighter, and you watch her for a moment before snatching the cigarette and light from her hands. You light it, then take a long pull. Your room is going to stink, but you’re leaving town soon anyway.

“That’s mine,” she says petulantly, reaching out an arm. You laugh, more cruelly than you intend to.

*****************************************************************************

Eventually, Lola admits that she may be pregnant, but that’s all she’s willing to give you. She words it strangely, though; something is at home in me, she says flatly, and you’re right, I shouldn’t smoke. And no hospitals, she’s emphasized, no doctors. Something in her pleading voice has told you not to push it.

Now you’re examining yourself in the full-length mirror on your bedroom wall, only inches from your own face, shorts peeled back. Lola has decided to bathe in your tub, and you send her off with a change of clothes and a clean towel, turning away while she strips. Her scent is vaguely stale, sort of animal, and her clothes are wrinkled as if they haven’t been changed in a few days. 

You have a small house tattooed on your hip, hidden in a soft, white spot beneath your underwear so your parents don’t see. You like to check up on it, just to make sure that this one permanent thing really is permanent. There’s a light in the window of your little home–it doesn’t show in the crude stick-n-poke outline you got for free at a party, but you know it’s there. 

The lines waver in parts, where your drunk friend screwed up and slanted the chimney, the windows, the shingles. The house looks like it’s been toppled and then precariously rebuilt after some natural disaster. Sometimes, when you forget it’s there, it looks three-dimensional somehow–tumorous and alien on your skin. 

As you lightly run your fingers over the ink, entranced by your own naked haunches, Lola steps out, clad in your sweatpants and pulling a large sweatshirt over her head. You catch a glimpse of her shining, bloated belly, and can’t help but wince at the sight of it. The skin is taut and yellow, with blue veins webbing all along it. 

You think of Rosemary’s Baby, then of Lola, then of her naked, of her bathing, of her toweling off, looking at herself in the fogged mirror. All these functions seem far too human for such a foreign and nubile creature. She’s probably rifled through your medicine cabinet and sighed sadly upon looking at your birth control (or maybe you’re just projecting).

She brushes her wet hair out of her face and cocks her head to the side. Now that she’s clean, soft and soap-smelling in your oversized pajamas, she reminds you of a child. Or, rather, of someone acting her own age. Your age. 

Despite her generally emaciated figure, her cheeks are full, and her nose is dotted with freckles. There are pimples along her hairline, and from here you can even see the beginnings of dark roots at her scalp. She’s still attractive, but not in the gaunt, intense way you initially thought her to be.

“Thanks,” she says, with a lopsided, unpretty smile. It’s the first time she’s thanked you, but you suddenly don’t mind. Suddenly you care for her and her shining, empty eyes like you owe her something of yourself. 

Maybe it’s because she’s dressed like the boys you’ve loved; most of your clothing is stolen from boyfriends and sort-of-boyfriends and stupid flings, emblazoned with the logos of colleges you don’t attend, vacation spots you’ve never visited. The sweatshirt she’s wearing now is from the philosophy major who once told you that you’d die young if you kept caring so violently for strangers, and the pants are from a soccer player you slept with in the autumn.

“No problem,” you say, wanting more than anything to hold her tightly, more than anything to be held, and suddenly you miss your mother. She’s only a few hours’ drive away, but you feel totally marooned with this childlike, unfriendly girl. You’re orphaned with her–nothing beyond your empty apartment feels real. Despair hits you all at once, and you involuntarily let out a little wail. 

Lola only stares.