Free In the Drink by Kate Christensen Page A

she said, holding the Ace-bandage-like contraption to her ownchest, “this is a brassiere for you, and you wear it so you don’t flop all over the place.” She had also brought along a box of maxi pads. Lauren had taught me to use a tampon already, but I watched in horrified, spellbound fascination as my mother held the pad to her crotch with the blasé practicality of a stewardess demonstrating a seat-belt fastener.
    At some point early in our freshman year of high school, Billy Snow must have woken up one day and realized that no one was going to help him escape, so he’d better do it himself. He skulked through the halls with his books tucked under one big hand, the other shoved deep in the pocket of his pants so it wouldn’t punch anyone. He never had a girlfriend, never went to a dance; his clothes were wrinkled and not quite clean, as if he’d worn them to bed, and he smelled strongly of cigarette smoke and unwashed hair. But he made every honor roll, and was a National Merit Scholar. He got into the University of Arizona on full scholarship.
    I got into Swarthmore with enough financial aid so my mother didn’t have to empty her savings account to send me there. During my sophomore year, when my mother joined the faculty of the New York State University at Albany, she turned her institute over to several of her staff, among them the treacherous, Skinner-reading Mark Wickers, who had managed to wriggle back into her good graces. She bought herself a Victorian house on a treelined street near the campus and started a private practice in addition to her teaching load. She’d been there, on the whole happily, ever since.
    Five years after I’d graduated from college and moved to New York, I was at the farmers’ market in Union Square one Wednesday evening, and there, standing over a table of apple cider, was Billy Snow. My first reaction, almost before I’d even recognized him, was a pang of relief at the restoration of a loss Ihadn’t known I’d sustained. The slope of his brow, his expression, the way he stood looked as familiar and poignant as if our long separation had been that of estranged spouses. “Billy,” I said abruptly. He turned and saw me, and for an instant looked blank. “Claudia Steiner,” he said then in disbelief, and his face came to life, smiling, glad to see me. We stood talking until we agreed that we were thirsty, and went to the Old Town Bar for the first of countless drinking bouts together.
    He had graduated the year before from Columbia Law School and had recently become a junior associate with a firm whose name was a string of Mayflower -sounding patronyms, which explained why he was wearing a suit, and why he occasionally and only half ironically used corporate jargon like “no-brainer” and “comfort zone.” But he still had that same edginess, the old restless balking at having to do what anyone told him. He was still trying to tame himself so he could get what he wanted.
    “I haven’t been back to Arizona in years,” I said over a pint of ale. “I hated it there, Billy. I didn’t even know it was beautiful until I left.”
    “I know exactly what you mean,” he said. “I’m William now, by the way.”
    I turned over in bed and listened to the traffic in the rain. A few cold, clear truths rose one by one through my consciousness like a flock of birds: I wasn’t even remotely worthy of William and I wasn’t ever going to have him; I’d asked my mother to lend me money and she’d said no; I’d given all the change to the cabdriver; no one was going to pay off my debts; no one would save me from myself. I fell asleep to the soft beating of wings in my head.

I awoke the next morning at eight o’clock, cheerful and oddly refreshed, with only the vaguest memory of the events of the night before. I lay in bed for a while, afloat on a buoyant and illusory sense of well-being, then arose by degrees, first sitting on the edge of my bed and scratching my head to clear