Noelle August - Boomerang

Ethan: Send me a picture of you.

I stare at the phone until the picture pops up.

Mia lies on her bed, and the light is all golden and soft, like it’s coming from the lamp at her bedside. Her dark hair spills over the soft pink pillows around her, and what I can see of her shoulders is smooth, bare skin with only the thinnest black strap of a tank top or bra. Her green eyes shine with anticipation, and yet her smile is mellow and sultry—and inviting as hell.

She looks like she’s at the point of smiling, and at the point of asking me to rock her world, and I know I’m past the point of going crazy for this girl.

Damn.

I know I’ll be staring at this picture all night. Imagining a thousand different scenarios, all of them starting with this moment, and ending with her quivering and saying my name. There’s no doubt about that. But right now, I need to get back downstairs. So I send her one last text.

Ethan: You’re beautiful, Mia. I’ll thank you for this tomorrow.

Mia

Q: Who taught you about true love?

In some alternate world, I’d be able to walk around like a normal person without bumping into furniture. Or I’d be able to focus on my poor Nana, who’s having a good day for once but whose words wink in and out in my mind like fireflies.

Thirty minutes until I leave to pick up Ethan.

That is literally the only thought I seem able to hold on to today. Of course, I started with twenty hours until I pick up Ethan, which has rendered the day useless in pretty much every arena. Like I had to keep checking to make sure I put on pants before leaving the apartment today.

Twenty-nine minutes, and Ethan likes you in just panties.

Or out of them.

Shut up, brain.

I drift into my mom’s studio, where she’s stretched across her chaise, backlit by the sun and holding a photographer’s loupe up to a contact print. I notice she’s only polished one set of toenails—exactly the kind of thing I might do today.

“What’re you working on?” I ask, though I know I won’t remember a thing she tells me.

Twenty-seven more minutes. . .

“New series,” she says, handing me the sheet and the loupe.

I sit on the edge of the chaise and bend toward the sunlight to get a better look. The images are raw: simple photos of people I don’t recognize, along with close-ups on some of their features—a flat pink scar against glossy brown skin; a trace of feathered lipstick above a full upper lip. There’s a starkness and an intimacy to them that’s so different for my mom. Quiet compared to the bold, exaggerated work she usually does.

I tell her so, and she smiles. “I like change. That’s why I keep telling you to play. The artist you are at twenty-one isn’t the same as the one you’ll be at forty. Or sixty. It’s important to be curious and open. Not fret so damn much.”

Today, that angst feels miles away. Ethan’s coming home. We’ll be together. And I definitely do plan to play.

I hand her back the sheet. “What drew you to this new idea?” I ask. “Or, like, to these particular people?” Part of me feels excited for her to make new discoveries and take new paths in her art. And part of me feels sad to think that part might not include me.

She smiles. “I just follow the light. All of these people had a kind of glow. From the inside. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yeah.” Ethan has that, I think. Bright and intense, like the flare of a match in the dark.

“You’ve got it too, my darling,” she says and cups my cheek.

Nana appears in the doorway, carrying a hinged brown leather box. Settling into a stiff-backed chair, she says, “She’s right, you know.”

“Thanks, Nan.” I feel so grateful to be here on this day, when her own light is so bright.

I point to the box. “What have you got there?”

“Oh, I just wanted you to have a few things.” She props open the lid and pulls out a handful of yellowing photographs. They’re pictures of my grandmother and grandfather on the beach at Coney Island. I flip them over for the date: July 1964.

My grandfather’s stretched out on his stomach in the sand, a pair of aviators resting on his curly dark hair and a sleepy grin on his face. My grandmother—who looks so young and so much like Audrey Hepburn here, it’s crazy—lies with her head on his back, a thick hardcover book resting against her chest, smiling up at the camera. It’s amazing how modern they look, though my grandmother’s white two-piece bathing suit has a high waist and is cinched with a thick gold belt.

It occurs to me to get my camera, to capture more of my grandmother’s life on a day when she’s happy and lucid. I run into the kitchen, fish it from my bag, and run back into the studio. I switch it on and focus on her.

“Do you remember what you were reading?” She can remember so much more of her past than she can of the present. I want to keep her talking, keep her happy and sounding like her old self for as long as I can.

She takes back the photograph and studies it. “Oh, it had to be The Group,” she tells me. “My girlfriends and I were all reading it. I’m surprised your grandfather looks so happy here. That book made me so mad at him. Well, at all men.” Winking at my mother, she adds, “It’s a miracle you were born the next year.”

My mother laughs. “Judging by how often you two locked me out of your room, it’s more of a miracle that I only have two brothers.”

“What was it like back then?” I ask. “Dating, I mean. Or relationships. Did you have a lot of single friends?” I want to ask if it’s always been like this—confusing. Exhilarating.

She shakes her head. “We all married young. Your age or younger. But maybe that was a little like dating.”

“What do you mean?”

“It took me a long time to get to know your grandfather,” she says. “We were practically strangers when we got married, but that’s what you did. You wanted someone, and then you married him. If you were lucky, you fell in love.”

“I don’t know if that’s everyone’s experience,” says my mother.

“Maybe not.” She takes back the photographs, closes the box, and hands it to me. “There’s a movie reel in there, too,” she says. “It’s from the march.”

“Jesus, Nana.” I practically start to drool. “You have film from the march on Selma in here?”

She nods. “I think it’s the day I fell in love with your grandfather. I mean really in love.”

“You were already pregnant with me!” my mother exclaims.

“What happened that day?” I think about Ethan because I can’t stop thinking about Ethan, because I have to leave in—I check my phone—seven minutes to get him and because I suddenly see myself in the future, sitting with my own children. Will I be telling stories about him? Am I in love with him?

I don’t know. I only know I want to see him, just to sit with him, breathe the same air. Okay, maybe attack him like an expensive buffet.

“So you were pregnant when you and Grandpa marched in Selma?”

“Yes. About six months along.”

“What made you fall in love with Grandpa that day?”

She runs her hand along the edge of the box, her expression dreamy. “A policeman knocked me down by accident, and your grandfather went crazy and attacked him. Grabbed a baton right out of the officer’s hand and beat the man with it.”

“He did?” I can’t put the sweet lazy smile in the photograph together with a man who’d attack a police officer.

“He did and got fifteen stitches for his trouble,” she says. “But you know him. He can be hot-headed.”

Anxiety flares at her use of the present tense, but I don’t correct her. “I guess we all can.”

“Stan was so mad at me that day, too. He wanted me to stay home because he knew it would be dangerous. But we’d been working side by side with all the other people in the law office to organize, to help do something about the terrible situation in the South. And I was naïve. Even though I saw the news reports myself, I didn’t believe they’d do anything. I guess I didn’t believe they’d hurt a cute Jewish girl from New York.”

I imagine the crowds and the chaos, picture my grandfather as a young man so filled with protectiveness and rage that he’d go up against an officer in riot gear, with a shield and baton.

“He picked me up and carried me, six months pregnant and no feather in those days, away from the crowd.” She touches her temple. “He had blood gushing from his face where they’d split it open. And he was like . . . like he’d mow down anyone in his path, police or no police. I think he could have walked through a wall if it meant getting me to safety.”

“I can see why you fell in love with him.” Again I think about Ethan, about him lifting me, no feather myself, and carrying me into his living room. And I think about how fair he is, and how loyal. He’d do what my grandfather did. I know that much.

Suddenly, I can’t wait another minute to get to see him.

I switch off my camera. “I have to get to the airport,” I tell Nana and my mom.

“Do you want to bring Ethan back for dinner?” my mom asks, but her smile quirks, and I can see she’s teasing me, that she knows—like she always knows—what’s on my mind.

“Um, maybe another night,” I tell her and give her a kiss on the forehead. Then I kiss and hug Nana. “I’m glad you fell in love,” I tell her.

Then I run for the door.

Ethan

Q: How do you like to be kissed: hard, soft or any which way?