The Unexpected Waltz by Kim Wright Page B

smell, but I do love their names, which sound like small promises. The garden came together so well that they put our house on the cover of Charlotte Fine Living magazine with me pictured in the foreground, sitting on a white silk couch that the photographer and his assistant had carried off the back of a truck and placed in the middle of the flowers. “She chose her roses by their names” was the first line of the article, a statement that makes me sound dreamy and a little bit daft, but everyone agreed that the picture of me sitting on that white couch in a white dress, gazing into the center of a Moonstone, was proof that our garden—that our very marital existence—was a great success.
    “Kelly?” Elyse’s voice is flickering. I must have walked too far from the house. “Did you say something? You’re breaking up.”
    “When it comes to men, I’m over,” I tell Elyse. “I’m like a garden at the end of a season.”
    “Some weird stuff has come out of your mouth lately but that’s the craziest thing you’ve said yet. You’re all about men and you always have been. More than anybody I know. That doesn’t just end with the snap of a finger.”
    “But what happens if you’re sexual and you don’t have anybody to be sexual with? I’ll be like that tree that falls in the forest and nobody’s there to hear it so it doesn’t make a sound.”
    “I always thought that tree made a sound.”
    “That’s not the point.”
    “You’re the one who brought it up.”
    “It was an illustration, Elyse. A metaphor. Men don’t see me anymore and that bothers me, even if they’re crappy men I never would have wanted in the first place. It’s one thing to face the end of sex and it’s a whole other thing to face the end of the possibility of sex. I think I need therapy. Or drugs. Do you know what I really need, in all seriousness? I need to meditate.”
    Elyse laughs. “You just need to get laid.” Getting laid is Elyse’s remedy for everything. If you told her you’d gone deaf in one ear or wrecked your car, she’d tell you that you just needed to get laid.

CHAPTER SIX
    E LYSE AND I met at cheerleading tryouts, the summer before ninth grade, and I liked her before I even knew her name. My childhood had been a series of lessons—piano and painting and horseback riding and finally gymnastics. I wasn’t particularly good at any of them, but after three years on the balance beam I knew I could handle any namby-pamby routines that a small-town high school cheerleading squad would put together. I was rock solid on a front flip. Pretty good for a back one. And I didn’t mind being on the top of the pyramid just as long as I had somebody strong below me. Just as long as I knew that the person designated to catch me when I fell out of formation would really be there.
    Elyse was strong. Anyone could tell that at a glance. She’s always seemed at home in her body, owning it in a way few young girls do. When I asked her “Can you catch me?” she said “Ab-so-lute-ly,” slowly extending all the syllables in that way that I would later learn meant that she was annoyed by the question. But I scrambled to the top of her shoulders and when that shaky moment came for me to release her hands and stand, it was like we’d been practicing together since birth. I dropped and she caught me, so effortlessly that the judges wanted to make sure it wasn’t a fluke. They made us do it again, over and over, until it was time to break for lunch.
    “If you ever want to drop, I’ll catch you,” I told her, even though I wasn’t totally sure I could do it. It seemed like the right thing to offer, but she had just tossed back her hair and said, “I don’t drop.”
    When the two weeks of tryouts ended, they not only picked me and Elyse for the varsity squad—making varsity was practically unheard-of for ninth graders—but they put us in the middle of the formation. We were together so much that the older girls called us