Hex - Rebecca Dinerstein Knight Page 0,6
haven’t, as a matter of principle, been bothering.
I told her I had stolen the beans and the seeds. She told me I’d lost my mind. I told her that for the first time in my long drab studies I had some new and exciting work to do, Rachel’s work. She asked if castor and monkshood were as deathly as thallium. I told her no, not as deathly, mostly scary if swallowed. She asked if I thought I’d be able to bring them back to a different lab. I told her it’s hard to sell a stolen painting. She asked how my parents had taken it and I said I hadn’t told them. My parents are retired now and I try, as I said, not to bother them. Mishti finds this puzzling because she’s better friends with her parents than with her friends. Her mother has fun within herself and manages to bring Mishti in on it. The Anjali Singh of Mishti’s childhood came home from the lab and started whistling, flinging her shoes around, frying things, pummeling the cat, encouraging all her children to crawl under the kitchen table and see what they could find down there.
My parents, to their credit, built a fun of their own, one to which I have never been openly invited. Their bi-religious marriage provoked such loathing from both sides, I think they coped by building a code, a secret language of defiance that I could hear them speaking to each other, and admire, but never really learn, having nothing of my own to fight against, having not earned the badge necessary to enter their rebels’ club. I don’t know whether getting expelled counts as a badge. I didn’t risk anything, I only lost everything. Loss doesn’t earn you any kind of dollar.
It was only after we’d talked about Tom and how distressed he’d looked in class and how he’d refused to tell her anything that she admitted you hadn’t liked her necklaces.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“She pursed her lips at me.”
“Joan’s lips are naturally pursed.”
(You can roll your eyes here without missing the next line.)
“No, but, she looked at my necklaces, and then she pursed.”
“Joan rejects embellishment.”
“What about her braid?”
“Her braid is her weapon.”
“And the earrings?”
“I don’t know, I’ve come to think of them as her ears.”
“They’re big hunks of stone.”
“Embellishment for the severe.”
“A severe celebrity botanist? I want her to like me.”
“I’ve been trying for five years.”
“She’s, like, your best friend.”
“From your lips to her ears.”
I looked just then at Mishti’s lips. There was a total and profound sculptural rightness to her face she had neither elected nor destroyed. I felt the honor of participating in the brief, biological fact of this sweet person’s tiring existence.
“Do the work,” I said to us both, “Joan’s only in it for the work.”
“In what?”
Mishti ran off with a clang of her bangles to meet Carlo at Hungarian Pastry. I knew it would take her over an hour on the F to the A B C to get from Smith-9th up to 110th and I didn’t think the B was running. It was absurdly inconvenient that I had moved down here, she hollered, halfway down the stairs. Then, from the bottom, “You’ve got mail.” I skipped down after her, forgetting the unscrewed screws that cover the steps and taking a nice deep poke in the foot. There it lay, half under the door and laughing at me, my last check from the registrar’s office. It felt like setting an egg. I’d deposit it, then boil myself until the timer beeped zero.
CARLO
Carlo Parada burst into our lives as if on horseback, one Sunday night, his jaw straighter and firmer than the line at a base of a triangle. If beauty loves beauty, he and Mishti could not have avoided each other for long. Back in April, when the Callery pears had flowered and Mishti had decked herself in blushes and golds, we walked past this guy crossing 117th. He stopped, turned, and followed Mishti’s scent back to its source. There she was, only half a block farther up Broadway. He overtook us and then cut across me, stopping and facing us. It seemed he was our combined height.
He extended a hand to Mishti and said, “You’re incredible.”
“I’m Mishti,” she actually replied. I kicked her calf to express my disappointment. I found him as sexual as an Amtrak train. They shook hands. At that point I might as well have lifted her onto my shoulders so that she