as ill conceived but also immutable. She accepted, too, that he would want her to be his sous-chef and that she would not be able to get out of it. He received the shucked corn without thanks and sent her around to the outdoor shower with a salad spinner, four heads of lettuce to wash and tear up, and an empty laundry basket in lieu of a colander. Agatha and Piper had been in the kitchen in their bathing suits for some reason, padding around like nudists, and Daphne and Dominique came in from outside as Livia was heading out. Daphne had a red sarong tied below her belly. “Daphne,” Livia said, hefting the basket of lettuce, “you must be really stressed out, what with the wedding being so close and all. So much to do.”
“Leave me alone, I’m pregnant,” Daphne said sweetly, reaching to accept a glass of iced tea from Piper.
The shower, a stall of cedar planks around a showerhead that stuck out from the side of the house, was near the back door. Livia turned on the water and picked up a head of lettuce, holding it under the spray while she tore apart the leaves and dropped them in the spinner. She felt the way she always did after she talked about her pregnancy: a little embarrassed and slightly unclean, like she had told a crude joke at a party. The sight of Agatha in her bikini had done nothing for her mood. She found herself imagining Agatha and Teddy together, and, arbitrary though the pairing was, the thought sickened her. She had heard about two or three girls he had been with since the breakup, and she thought of those girls with Teddy, too, fragments and pieces of bodies, the whole too gruesome to contemplate. Teddy was still the lone notch on her pathetic bedpost. She dug her fingers into the lettuce, making ragged rips she knew her father would not like, and then she clapped the lid on the spinner and pulled its cord, yanking as though starting an outboard motor.
“Teddy got me pregnant”—that was what she said even though the bulk of the blame was hers. Pills either nauseated her or caused insupportable mood swings; diaphragms caused constant infections; she was afraid to get an IUD; the shot had made her roommate gain fifteen pounds. That left condoms. She fell into a habit of chancing a few days around her period when they could skip the part where Teddy picked at the foil wrapper with his thumbnail, tore it open, held the small jellyfish close to his face to see which way it unrolled, and finally applied it, like some ludicrous hazmat suit, to his penis, which all the condom-related exertions of his brain had robbed of some tumescence. Her gamble succeeded for eight months or so and, with discipline, might have lasted longer if she and Teddy had not hit a rough patch, caused, like all of their rough patches, by his attention to another girl. In the relief of their reconciliation, Livia allowed herself to imagine that they were in the green-lit pastures of the safe zone.
A week after the breakup, she had decided one night to get roaringly drunk alone in her room and dress up in pearls and a party dress. Snow was predicted, but she chose a summer dress patterned with large, old-fashioned roses. From her roommate’s closet she fished out high, spindly heels that would have frightened her had she been sober, especially given the iciness of the brick sidewalks. She could not get the zipper in back all the way up, and, for one moment, as she stretched and strained with one elbow poking toward the ceiling and the other bent behind her, she was overtaken by wretchedness and sat down on the futon to shed a few tears. Then the gin kicked back in, and she was out the door without a coat, teetering around patches of snow toward the Ophidian, a few inches of her spine framed by the V of her undone zipper. Around her, girls skimmed by in their going-out clothes, underdressed for the cold and, like her, catching their heels in the divoted ice and the grooves between the bricks. Each group of girls was a single, shimmering consciousness, like a flock of birds or a school of fish, moving together in an elaborate, private choreography, their sequins and silks tossing back the streetlights. The boy at the club’s door hesitated when he saw her, but she pushed past him.
She thought she heard him say that Teddy wasn’t there, and she said, “Fuck Teddy,” to no one in particular. She made a tour of the rooms, tripping on the nap of the Persian carpets and the knotty floorboards. Pounding hip-hop filled the clubhouse, at odds with the ponderous, old-fashioned interior, which was all tufted leather, dark paint, carved wood, and grim brass light fixtures. The décor suggested a nostalgic, appropriated Englishness, as though the Ophidian had once possessed faraway colonial holdings. Framed photographs of members, letters they’d written or received, doodles they’d made on cocktail napkins, and other inscrutable ephemera crowded on the walls. “You’re all dead now,” Livia muttered to the class of 1918, “even though you were in the Ophidian.” The club, she thought, was an institution that existed for little purpose other than to select its members. Once you were in, then what? Then you sat around drinking and gossiping until it was time to choose new members, with whom you sat around drinking and gossiping until the time came to choose the next batch. There was no point to it, not really. The Ophidian was a decoy, a façade, a factory that produced nothing. Her father loved that stupid snake swallowing its own tail. He said it was about self-sufficiency, renewal, and rebirth, shedding skins but persisting, having no beginning and no end. She thought it was about going nowhere, about finding no better option than to devour yourself.
People were looking at her, she knew, and she leered back at them, at the looming faces she knew or seemed to know. She found herself sitting on the arm of a leather couch and laughing at something the boy beside her was saying. She laughed so hard she couldn’t catch her breath. She took a sip from the plastic cup in her hand and realized it was full of water.
“This is water,” she announced. “I didn’t ask for water. If I wanted water, I would have asked for it.”
The boy on the couch looked embarrassed. She wondered how she had ever thought he was funny. “Stephen thought maybe you’d had enough.”
“Oh, is that what Stephen thought?” She was standing now. The room went quiet around her, and she swung left and then right to get a good look at it. “What?” she said. “You think I’m drunk? Stephen thinks I’m drunk? Well, you can tell Stephen that I’m drinking for two! Know what I mean? But don’t wait for Teddy to tell you and don’t send any cigars!” Water slopped out of her glass and onto her toes. “Shit.” When she bent down to wipe it away, she lost what was left of her balance and tipped forward, arcing toward the oriental carpet. As soon as she hit (or was it before? did she even fall?), she felt a pair of hands on her sides, righting her. One of them zipped up her dress. “Teddy?” she whimpered.
The hands did not belong to Teddy, though she spotted him then in the doorway, still wearing his coat, flushed pink under his orange hair, staring at her in a way she knew neither of them could recover from. His contempt radiated from across the hushed room, and she could only send back contrition and animal desperation.
Her rescuer was the despised, vodka-withholding Stephen. “Okay,” he said. “That’s enough party.”
He took her to a back room, and together they went through her phone until they found a soberish friend who agreed to come get her and walk her home. “Bring a coat she can wear,” Stephen said into the phone. “And a pair of boots.”
As they sat and waited, Livia studying the floorboards and Stephen the ceiling, he said, “I would take you myself, but it wouldn’t look good. Teddy’s my friend. I’m the one who called him. He came here to get you.”
All the way home, through the falling snow and the purple-orange glow of the streetlights, while the world rattled around her, jarred by each clumsy step she took in her too-big borrowed boots, Livia convinced herself that Stephen would e-mail the next day to check on her, and something would begin, growing out of the snow like a crocus.
There were e-mails the next day, but none from him.
LIVIA LEFT HER BASKET of washed lettuce on the deck and went into the kitchen. “Dad?” she called. “What do you want me to do with the lettuce?”
Her father approached from his study carrying a thick book bound in blue canvas. “BIRDS” was stamped in silver on the spine. “I’ve solved our little mystery,” he said. “Listen.” He flipped to a page he had been marking with his finger and read, “Herons are a large family of wading birds including egrets and bitterns. Egrets are any of several herons, tending to have white or buff plumage.” He closed the book. “That settles it. We were both right.”