Creve Coeur
by Ann Zhang
There were no couples in Lottie’s Bridal, only my sister and I and, on the opposite side of the rack, a group of teenage girls petting a flowery tulle dress. A blonde girl who laughed louder than her friends snatched the hanger and held it against her neck.
They looked like St. Joe’s girls. I made a note to ask my sister if they went to the same school she did—the same school I used to go to—or another of the dozen single-sex Catholic schools in the area that perpetuated the odd tradition of making high schoolers wear wedding gowns to receive their diplomas. St. Joe’s had our girls dance around a maypole adorned with green and white ribbons, historically as an ode to fertility.
While I was thinking about maypoles, my sister carried her two favorite choices into the dressing room. Now she emerged from her stall, standing proud and beautiful in a simple white gown. “Essie, I like this one the most,” she said, calling for my attention.
I nodded. I could tell that my sister had already decided, and anyway, the dress was flattering. She let me try it on after her, maybe feeling sorry about how my high school graduation took place over video call four years ago. The silk sleeves slipped halfway down my forearms, and the bodice gaped around my chest. My sister’s face pinched. Troubled, probably, by the drastic transformation that my parents’ friends pointed out whenever I made an appearance at Chinese Pickleball League: “She’s grown so thin!”
Gone was strong Esther, with her hulkish shoulders and state-qualifying times in the 100-butterfly and the 200-IM. Now the mothers said I was mei nu, a pretty girl. They smiled without teeth and nudged their sons in my direction.
My sister just said she was sorry for the dress’ three-digit price. Behind the stall door, I lifted it over my head, staring up at the dark warehouse ceiling and its crystal chandeliers.
We handed the dress to a shop associate with pale, dewy skin like a beluga whale, and I put down my credit card, even though the number it had accumulated was creeping closer and closer to the grand total in my bank account. In the car, my sister thanked me by searching up my Spotify profile and playing my favorite songs until we turned into the driveway.
***
In my two weeks of living at home, I attended check-ins with a dentist and my family doctor, who told me I should start looking for new medical professionals to see me regularly once I settled in New York. I accompanied my parents on trips to local grocery stores whose names sprung from the back of my mind like a forgotten first language—Schnucks, Dierbergs, Seafood City, and so on.
Some evenings I joined my parents for pickleball practice. Their league practiced in the corridors of an abandoned mall, where they’d set up a series of courts. Even with no technique and a shaky grasp of scorekeeping, I could beat a contingent of the least athletic moms. Mostly, though, I went off on my own, driving my mother’s minivan up I-270 toward Creve Coeur Lake. In actual French the name would be written like crève-cœur, which translates to heartbreak, but everyone in St. Louis said something that rhymed with “grieve more.”
Creve Coeur housed an oxbow lake encircled by a flat, paved path of about four miles. Half of the loop was shrouded by oak trees while the other half unfurled into a beachy stretch where people would picnic or allow their mud-soaked dogs to splash around the shoreline. I had nurtured a precious habit of running along this path ever since my first Thanksgiving back from college, when I made a vow to never swim again.
In this regard, my final summer before entering the workforce was no different from the last three years. I had been running six times a week since the day after I received my bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics. My family flew out to watch me throw confetti in the air, and then we all flew home together, and the race began. There were dresses to buy and AP tests to study for before my sister’s high school graduation.
On my eighth day circling the lake, I jogged past one of my old English teachers from St. Joe’s. He was a short, fish-mouthed man who told me—in response to an email I wrote about revisiting Paradise Lost—to call him Steven. Back in high school I had a habit of falling in love with my mentors in a predictable and all-consuming way, which was fortunate for my class participation but unfortunate in every other regard.
When I heard Steven’s voice yelling my name, I slowed to a power walk. We were near the edge of the wooded area, where it opens to the shore, and I could see all the way across the lake, the rosy sunset extending across a mile of steel blue water, the kind that turns out grey in pictures. My English teacher huffed and puffed while catching up to me. I laid a hand against my diaphragm, inhaling the crude scent of warm geese droppings.
Steven was a scriptwriter who used to direct our regional Model UN program. I found it charming that he had no personal webpage dedicated to his artistry, as many professional artists did. To find out about his work, you had to dig through news reports and interviews in which he talked about reading novels at bedtime alongside his Czech mother. I was moved by the image of him as a sweet child whose dreams spilled beyond his reach.
“I didn’t know you were a runner,” Steven said. “Would have sooner expected to see you cutting straight through the lake.”
At his prompting, I talked about quitting the college swim team and avoiding pools at all costs, how the scent of chlorine could send my heart fluttering like the roll of a snare drum. Yes, I had taken several courses in creative writing. No, I wasn’t thinking about grad school. Steven said that he hoped the consultants were paying me a great deal of money to justify keeping me away from my true calling of writing personal narratives. I laughed. By then we’d reached his car.
When I got home, I logged into my high school email and reread some of my favorite pieces in a sort of masturbatory manner. I saw that Steven had left me an email about seeing a live show at the Gaslight Theater, a series of new plays from writers from around the world. He wasn’t one of them, but he had helped to judge the winning entries, and he thought I might enjoy a particular one-act about a woman navigating her early twenties on the East Coast.
I drafted an affirmative response, deleted it, retyped it in roughly the same words, then left it in my drafts. A few hours later I pressed ‘send.’
***
At a moment when I was feeling generous, I agreed to attend Friday church service. Since I was going, and since there was only one remaining AP test, my sister came along too. Four of us piled into the minivan with my mom and dad in the front, my sister and I in the middle row. I had a sudden feeling that my body was meant to be a decade smaller, like I shouldn’t have been able to grab the ceiling handle without straining.
It was maybe once or twice a year that we all went to church together. I’d long suspected that my parents dragged us there primarily for the Chinese-American community, secondarily for the whole religious aspect, even though they sent a lot of Bible verses to the family group chat. Friday services were informal—only an hour of sermon followed by joyous socialization. Once when I was dating a gawky white boy from club swim, I brought him along, and he said it wasn’t as bad as he’d expected.
That evening, the pastor meditated on living a Christ-centered life. I pictured Christ as the Sun and every person in my life, like my sister and my college roommate and the shop associate at Lottie’s Bridal, as tiny planets revolving around Him. Then I realized I had failed to place myself in the diagram and decided that I could be Earth: a planet that I understood more deeply than the others.
“We might feel like our job or our kids are the most important thing we have. These things are important. But really we are not working to pay the bills, and we are not raising our kids so that they can be successful. We are doing all of these things to honor the Lord.” The pastor gestured toward the back wall of the worship room.
Eventually someone opened the doors, and members of the congregation streamed out and gathered around trays of red grapes and butterfly cookies balanced atop rolling carts all around the gymnasium. Middle-school boys tossed basketballs at a netless hoop, looking taller and pimplier than they did a year ago.
My mom held my wrist as her friends came to see me. All of them said something nice about my appearance, and the professionally oriented women asked about my job-to-be. Everyone was shorter than me. My Chinese had atrophied to the point that I couldn’t shape any of my too-honest thoughts into complex sentences, so I condensed them into vacant generalizations—this was fun, that was bad, I liked it very much.
The most memorable visitor was a woman who went to college with my mom, a talented pickleball player. She informed me that her daughter’s friend, a girl named Schumacher, had snuck a full second under my school record in the 200-IM. I offered my compliments and wondered if Schumacher could see to the edge of her athletic career or if she was still squinting through the fog, unable to imagine her body softening, devolving from its strongest form.
***
Familiar faces plagued every region of St. Joe’s campus. In the main quadrangle, my former classmates touched each other’s forearms and nodded like genuine adults. Many of them wore high-heeled sandals. As I dashed indoors, a former science teacher of mine held the door open with an airy “Good to see you, Esther!”
There were thirty minutes before the ceremony was scheduled to begin, so I killed eight of them in the single-person bathroom stall, completing both the Wordle and the New York Times Sudoku on easy mode. Then I rose from the toilet, washed my hands, shook them dry, and wandered the halls of the academic building, picking up my pace if any room happened to have its lights on.
The classroom belonging to Steven was empty. An hour before the festival of new plays, he’d written to inform me that one of his kids had fallen ill, but he hoped I would nonetheless enjoy the show and write him my impressions of it. By the time I noticed his message, I had already parked in a far corner of the lot. I paused for only a minute between reading it and shifting the gear into reverse.
I remembered having a locker beside Steven’s room during my freshman year. Couldn’t identify which one precisely. I continued downstairs past the cafeteria entrance and its orange-peel wall showcasing student artwork—currently, charcoal depictions of a chair. None of the signatures resembled my sister’s.
In daylight again, I strode to the freshly decorated seating area where the ceremony was settling into place. Almost every chair held an animated member of the St. Joe’s community. My parents waved me over, and I found my seat between them.
An angelic choir sang from the speaker hidden somewhere behind the oak podium. The senior girls traipsed down the aisle between our sea of plastic chairs, a fifty-bride procession, my sister beaming near the front. Across the quad, I could see the maypole, its green and white ribbons fastened at the base.
The school president was a tall woman who never looked directly into your eyes, only above them, like she was appraising the size of your forehead. She invited the student body president and a shy, class-nominated speaker onstage. Both seemed self-conscious. Once they reached their conclusions, the president reclaimed her place at the podium, brushing sweat from her thinly arched brows, and delivered a speech in which she praised every girl in the class for her most admirable qualities. My sister had “a quiet, kind-hearted character.”
Four years ago, I was “unstoppable.” At the time I thought this was a scandalously obvious stand-in for the fact that I was frigid and disliked among my peers. But recently, I’ve been possessed by a sneaky admiration for the Esther that I used to be. I missed her as you miss a dead dog.
Earlier that day, I stood naked in front of my bathroom mirror, letting the steam obscure my strange reflection. Hanging at the end of the towel rack was a summer dress from my mom’s closet, which she’d brought to me during winter break, remarking that it wouldn’t have suited me until now. After I combed my hair and wiped the shower water from my arms and legs, I zipped the dress around me. It fit snugly, like a racing suit of sorts.
Parents lifted their phones in the air as the graduates proceeded to the maypole, and the bodiless speaker played a bright, delicate waltz. In groups of two or four, the girls stepped in unison, swaying to one side or the other or curtsying in rhythm. They swung their leafy garlands left and right and spun to captivate the audience and then each other. Some girls peeled away from the circle and knelt at the foot of the pole to fetch ribbons, then carried them out to their ribbonless partners, until all of the strands billowed like stripes on a tent.
By the last measure of the dance, I lost track of my sister. Dozens of gowns mimicked the one we’d bought together. The sky was turning white above us, too. I felt relieved to finally stand and cheer—a wordless cry, but she knew what it meant.
***
I went back to Creve Coeur Lake once more before my flight to New York. The temperature had climbed so high that the picnicking families brought tiny fans and passed them from person to person. Nobody barbecued. I started at a jog, then sprinted near the beach. In the opposite direction of my running, some cars sped by blasting the summer’s top hits, while others growled from zero to thirty after pulling out of the lakeside parking lot.
Soon I would be sleeping in a bed next to my college roommate, a brilliant mathematician who would mourn me for no more than a year if I vanished. I would be cooking vegetables with no one to peer over my shoulder and tell me when I was skipping a crucial step.
It occurred to me that the only people I truly loved were the ones who called me Essie. I thought maybe I could live for them—my parents and my sister, my most beloved planets—the same way I was supposed to live for something everlasting. Every time my shoe hit the earth, a sharp pain traveled from my knees to the top of my head, and as it moved behind my eyes they burned hot with tears, which fell from my chin like beads of sweat. My shirt was drenched in an entirely new color.
“Ma’am, ma’am!” The voice was low with a faint Southern accent.
To the right of the path, in a treasured clearing under the shade of the leafiest trees, a young family convened around a picnic table. The dad was waving at me. His two daughters ate sandwiches from Ziploc bags, studying me with deer-like skepticism. At their feet sat a navy handheld cooler.
With his rugged hand, the dad extended a plastic bottle of Ice Mountain. He had just grabbed it from the cooler, and its shape was slightly shrunken, slippery with condensation.
“You look like you could use a splash of cold water,” he said.
“Thank you, you’re right,” I said between breaths.
The bottle moved from his grasp to mine. I smiled at each of the girls and, fingers trembling, unscrewed the cap.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Ann Zhang grew up in St. Louis, Missouri and recently graduated from Yale, where she studied computer science and film. When she isn’t writing fiction, she enjoys reading books, writing scripts (plays & screenplays), playing golf, making experimental soups, and eating mac & cheese at Panera Bread (St. Louis Bread Co).
Twitter: annleezhang
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