Bound by Antonya Nelson

Or discuss how best to purge meals, or pierce one another’s ice-numbed upper ear rims using needles and corks, or carve into one another’s shoulder, with a Zippo-flame-sterilized shoplifted pocket knife, an asterisk, to signify the idea of extra content, footnoted character not readily available to the average, casual eye. Still there, Catherine thought, touching hers briefly, a little star-shaped divot.
    “No,” he said, “we didn’t do that, either.”
    “Still, it astonishes me, too,” Catherine said. “The dying, that most. Besides my dad, I don’t know very many dead people.”
    “You will,” he said in that world-weary way he had. His family was entirely gone; he did not mourn the loss particularly, those people who’d not really understood him and wouldn’t be around to trouble him now.
    “Then the bequeathing and the naming, a whole other ball of wax.” It was the fact of the name, she understood, that most intrigued. That for fifteen years there’d been plenty of general but only one other particular Catherine in the world. “She was never very happy with her own name,” she recalled. “Misty.” Misty. Into the telephone, in the high school halls—once it had been a name always on her lips, and now not for years. It carried with it the distinct sensation of regret. A turned back.
    “Misty?” her husband said. “I never knew a Misty before. Dusty, yes, Misty, no. I know a Rusty and a Sandy and a Hunter, even a Rocky, but no Misty. What could that be short for?”
    “Misdemeanor?” Catherine guessed. “I never thought about it. For all I know, she was named for that movie.”
    “She was already around when that movie came out,” he said. “You have an abysmal sense of history.”
    “And math. And geography.”
    “Those, too.” He said it gently, fondly, pleased once more with her silliness.
    “We were Misty and Cat, back then, sometimes Foggy and Dog. She lived a totally different life from mine. She was what I guess you might call white trash, although we didn’t call it that. My mom called her The Bad Influence. She got blamed for everything, even though some of it was my idea.” Most of it? Catherine wondered. She’d been a sheltered child, brought up by idealists, good citizens; she’d been restless, however, even before meeting up with Misty, restless and sometimes naughty. Her own parents were teachers, voters, drinkers of milk, while Misty lived with her grandmother, in a ratty house where certain lights were never extinguished, like a convenience store, where there was always some vigilant wakeful presence, scheming, ready to greet anyone who came through the door, just as ready to phone the police and rat out that anyone. The old woman—not a jolly gray-haired grandma but a scrawny embittered alcoholic on whom everyone dumped what they no longer wanted, the odd pet or child or broken machine—the smell of her home, the nauseating gloom, the occasional creepy relative, moody malcontents always giving the impression that they’d been recently released from a state institution of one sort or another, always with the twitchy gestures and paranoid countenance of the confined. “My parents didn’t approve, but they also were sworn liberals, so they were duty-bound to trust me with my decisions. Misty scared them. Which I must have liked about her. She was like a lesson I wanted them to learn. She’d been held back in grade school, so she was already driving a car by ninth grade. Her teeth looked like something out of the Soviet Union. The epitome of white trash: she had a car but not a dentist.”
    “The lure of the dark side,” said her husband. “You met how?”
    Catherine closed her eyes, trying to recall, sending herself into the dizzy void of memory, amplified by the evening’s cocktails, but no inaugural event appeared. Misty in the driver’s seat of the beat-up Buick, Misty waiting slouched against lockers outside classrooms, Misty flirting with a man holding