Amanda grew thinner as winter wore on. Her long kneesocks slipped and pooled in folds around her ankles. Her face was drawn to a point and sometimes feverish, so her eyes looked glossy as white marbles against its flush. Our homeroom teacher, Sister Wolf, let her wear a turquoise sweater studded with yellow spots after Amanda explained that neither one of her parents was home and she had shrunk her uniform sweater by accident. That same day her nose began to bleed in science class, and I watched Sister Donovan stand for fifteen minutes behind her desk, cupping Amanda’s head in her palm while another girl caught the dark flow of her blood in a towel. Amanda’s eyes were closed, the lids faintly moist. As I stared at her frail hands, the blue chill marbling the skin of her calves, I knew that nothing mattered more to me than she did. My mouth filled with a salty taste I couldn’t swallow, and my head began to ache. I would do anything for her. So much love felt dangerous, and even amid the familiar, dull surroundings of my classroom, I was afraid.
Later that day, I saw Amanda resting outside on a bench. With my heart knocking in my chest, I forced myself to sit beside her. I glanced at her arm, but her sweater sleeves reached the tops of her wrists.
“Are your parents on vacation?” I asked.
“They’re getting a divorce.”
Uttered by Amanda, the word sounded splendid to me, a chain of bright railway cars sliding over well-oiled tracks. Divorce.
“My parents are divorced,” I told her, but it hissed when I said it, like something being stepped on.
Amanda looked at me directly for the first time since that day in the girls’ room, weeks before. Her irises were broken glass. “They are?” she asked.
“My father lives in California.”
I longed to recount my entire life to Amanda, beginning with the Devil’s Paint Pots I had visited with my father at Disneyland when I was six. These were craters filled with thick, bubbling liquids, each a different color. They gave off steam. My father and I had ridden past them on the backs of donkeys. I hadn’t seen him since.
“I have a brother,” Amanda said.
The Devil’s Paint Pots bubbled lavishly in my mind, but I said nothing about them. Amanda crossed her legs and rapidly moved one foot. She fiddled with her bracelets.
“Why do you watch me all the time?” she asked.
A hot blush flooded my face and neck. “I don’t know.”
Our silence filled with the shouts of younger children swinging on the rings and bars. I thought of the days when I, too, used to hang upside down from those bars, their cold metal stinging the backs of my knees. I hadn’t cared if my dress flopped past my head and flaunted my underwear. But it was ninth grade now, and nothing was the same.
“If you could have one wish,” Amanda said, looking at me sideways with her broken eyes, “what would it be?”
I thought about it. There were plenty of things I wanted: to poke freely through the cupboards of our altar, to eat communion wafers by the fistful and take a gulp of the sacred wine. But I told Amanda, “I’d wish to be you.”
I had never seen her really smile before. Her teeth were slightly discolored, and her gums seemed redder than most people’s. “You’re crazy,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re really nuts.”
She hunched over and made a high, thin sound like a damp cloth wiping a mirror. I thought at first that her nose was bleeding again, but when I leaned over to look at her face, I saw she was only laughing.
Each morning, as the arc of frost on my windowpane grew taller, I worried about the coat. It hung in my closet like an eager pet I knew I would have to feed eventually. When I touched the soft fur, it swung a little. I had an urge sometimes to stroke it.
While I was dressing for school one day, my mother came into my room. Her face was puffy with sleep, her lips very pale. It still amazed me to think that she and Julius shared the big bed where she had slept alone so many years, where I had slept, too, when I had nightmares. I imagined an extra room where Julius slept, an inner door outside which he and my mother kissed good night and then did not meet again until morning.
“It’s cold outside,” my mother said.
I nodded, scanning my closet for a sweater. I could feel her watching the coat. She was quiet while I pulled on my kneesocks.
“You know,” she said, “Julius really likes you. He thinks you’re terrific.” Her voice was filled with pleasure, as if just saying his name felt good.
“I know it,” I said. And I did—he fixed me pancakes in the morning and had offered many times to take me to his warehouse, where I pictured row after row of soft, beckoning furs. “Pretty soon,” I would mutter vaguely.
“Sarah,” my mother said, and waited for me to look at her. “Please won’t you wear it?”
She had flat hair and an open, pleading face. When she was dressed up and wearing her makeup, my mother could look beautiful to me. But now, in the early white light of a winter morning as she balanced her cup on her kneecap, she looked worn out and sad.
“I will,” I said, meaning it now. “I’ll wear the coat when it’s freezing.”
Two weeks before the start of Christmas vacation, Amanda wasn’t in school. When I saw her empty chair, I felt a flicker of dread. I came inside the classroom and sat at my desk, but without Amanda to hook my attention to, the room felt baggy. I worried, before the teacher had even called her absent, that she would not be back.
A special assembly was called. Our headmistress, Sister Brennan, announced to the school that Amanda had run away from home with her brother, a high school dropout who worked at Marshall Field’s, and several stolen credit cards. As Sister Brennan spoke, there was a vast stirring around me, like on the day when we learned that Melissa Shay, two years below me with long gold braids, had died of leukemia during summer vacation. This stir was laced with delight, a jittery pleasure at news so shocking that it briefly banished all traces of normal life. I twisted around with the other girls, exchanging pantomimed amazement. It comforted me to feel like one of them, to pretend this news of Amanda meant no more to me than a shorter math class.
After that, I couldn’t concentrate. I felt physical pain in my stomach and arms as I walked through the doors of Sacred Heart, this place Amanda had discarded. She’d left me behind with the rest: Father Damian in his robes, the old chalkboards and desks, the solemn chapel with its stink of damp stone and old lint, its stale echoes of the same words endlessly repeated. As Father Damian lectured to us on Amanda’s sin, I noticed how the clerical collar squashed and wrinkled his neck, so it looked like a turkey’s, how his eyes were thick and clouded as fingernails. I looked at Jesus and saw, where His crossed ankles should have been, the neatly folded drumsticks on a roasting chicken. I stopped looking at Him.
What compelled me instead was her desk. For weeks and weeks—who knew how long?—Amanda had sat there, twirling her pen against her cheek and planning her escape. After school sometimes, when the shadowy halls had emptied, I would sit in her chair and feel the ring of her absence around me. I opened the desk and fingered her chewed pencils, the grimy stub of her eraser, a few haphazard notes she had taken in class. One by one I took these items home with me, lined them carefully along my windowsill, and watched them as I went to sleep. I imagined Amanda and her brother padding over thick dunes of sand, climbing the turrets of castles. In my thoughts this brother bore a striking resemblance to Jesus. As for Amanda, she grew more unearthly with each day, until what amazed me was less the fact that she had vanished than that I had ever been able to see her—touch her—in the first place.
One night, when my mother had gone to a meeting and Julius was reading in the den, I took a razor blade from the pack he kept in the medicine cabinet. I held it between my fingers and carried it to my bedroom, where I sat on the edge of my bed and took off my sweater. I was still wearing my school jumper with the short-sleeved blouse underneath, and I placed a pillow across my lap and lay my bare arm over it. My forearm was white as milk, smooth, and full of pale blue snakin
g veins. I touched it with the blade and found that I was terrified. I looked around at my childhood bears, my bubbling aquarium, and my ballerina posters. They were someone else’s—a girl whose idea of mischief had been chasing those fish through their tank with her wet arm, trying to snatch their slippery tails. For a moment I felt her horror at what I was about to do, and it made me pause. But I had to do something. This was all I could think of.
Gently but steadily, I sank one corner of the blade into the skin halfway between my elbow and wrist. The pain made tears rush to my eyes, and my nose began to run. I heard an odd humming noise but continued cutting, determined not to be a baby, set on being as fierce with myself as I’d seen Amanda be. The razor went deeper than the pin had. For a moment the cut sat bloodless on my arm—for an instant—and then, like held breath, blood rose from it suddenly and soaked the white pillowcase. This happened so fast that at first I was merely astonished, as though I were watching a dazzling science film. Then I grew dizzy and frightened by the mess, this abundance of sticky warmth I could not contain.
I’d done something wrong, that was obvious. From the kitchen I heard the kettle boil, then the creak of Julius’s chair as he rose to take it off the stove. I wished my mother were home. I tried to go to Julius and ask for help, but my arm felt so damaged, sending blood wherever I looked, and I couldn’t seem to lift it.
“Julius?” I called. The name sounded unfamiliar, and it struck me that I hadn’t said it aloud in nearly a year. The kettle was still whistling, and he didn’t hear me.
“Dad!” I hollered, and it sounded even stranger than “Julius” had.
From the next room I heard the stillness of a pause. “Dad!” I called again. The wet warmth was soaking through to my legs, and I felt lightheaded. As I leaned back and shut my eyes, I remembered the Devil’s Paint Pots with their wisps of steam, the man beside me on a donkey. Then I heard the door to my room burst open.
I was shivering. My teeth knocked together so hard that I bit my tongue. Julius wrapped me in the fox-fur coat and carried me to the car. I fell asleep before we reached it.
At the hospital they stitched my arm and wrapped it in white gauze. They hung it in a sling of heavy fabric, and despite my shock over what I’d done to myself, I couldn’t help anticipating the stir my sling would cause in homeroom. Julius spoke to my mother on the phone. I could tell she was frantic, but Julius stayed calm throughout.
When we were ready to go, he held up the coat. It was squashed and matted, covered with blood. I thought with satisfaction that I had ruined it for good.
“I think we can clean it,” said Julius, glancing at me. He was a big man with olive skin and hair that shone like plastic. Each mark of the comb was visible on his head. I knew why my mother loved him, then—he was the sort of man who stayed warm when it was cold out, who kept important tickets and slips of paper inside his wallet until you needed them. The coat looked small in his hands. Julius held it a moment, looking at the matted fur. Stubbornly I shook my head. I hated that coat, and it wasn’t going to change in a minute.
To my surprise, Julius began to laugh. His wide, wet lips parted in a grin, and a loud chuckle shook him. I smiled tentatively back. Then Julius stuffed the coat into the white cylinder of the hospital garbage can. “What the hell,” he said, still laughing as the silver flap moved back into place. “What the hell.” Then he took my hand and walked me back to the parking lot.
Months later, in early summer, Sacred Heart and St. Peter’s joined forces to give their annual formal dance. I was invited by Michael McCarty, a handsome, sullen boy with bright blue eyes, who had the habit of flicking the hair from his face more often than necessary. He seemed as frightened as I was, so I said yes.
I needed white shoes. After school one afternoon in our last week of classes, I went to a large discount shoestore downtown. I walked through the door and shut my eyes in disbelief.
Amanda was seated on a small stool, guiding a woman’s foot into a green high-heel. There were crumpled tissue papers around her. I noticed her hair was longer now, and she was not so thin as before.
I had an urge to duck back out the door before she saw me. Although I hardly thought about Amanda anymore, I still clung to the vague belief that she had risen above the earth and now lived among those fat, silvery clouds I’d seen from airplane windows. What I felt, seeing her, was a jolt of disappointment.
“Amanda,” I said.
She twisted around to look at me, squinting without recognition. Her confusion shocked me: for all the time I’d spent thinking of Amanda, she had barely known who I was.
“Oh yeah,” she said, smiling now. “Sacred Heart.”
She told me to wait while she finished with her customer, and I went to look for my shoes. I picked white satin with tiny pearl designs sewn on top. I brought them to the cash register, where Amanda was waiting, and she rang them up.
“Where do you go to school?” I asked.
She named a large public school and said she liked it better there. Her fingers moved rapidly over the keys.
Lowering my voice, I asked, “Where did you go?”
Amanda flipped open the cash drawer and counted out my change, mouthing the numbers. “Hawaii,” she said, handing me the bills.
“Hawaii?” It was not what I’d imagined.
My mind filled with a vision of grass skirts, flower necklaces, and tropical drinks crowded with umbrellas and canned cherries. Julius had been there, and this was how he’d described it.
“We were there two weeks,” Amanda said. “Then my dad came and got us.” She did not sound ashamed of this in the least. As she handed me my box in its plastic bag, she said, “He came all the way over, he had to. Or else we would’ve stayed forever.”
Amanda closed the register drawer and walked me out to the street. The day was warm, and we both wore short sleeves. Her arms were smooth and lightly tanned. On my own arm, the scar was no more than a thin pink line.
We stood a moment in silence, and then Amanda kissed me goodbye on the cheek. I caught her smell—the warm, bready smell that comes from inside people’s clothes. She waved from the door of the shoestore, then went back inside.
I felt a sudden longing not to move from that spot. I could feel where her arms had pressed, where her hands had touched my neck. The smell was still there, warm and rich like the odor a lawn gives off after hours of sunlight. I tried to spot Amanda through the store windows, but sunlight hit the glass so that I couldn’t see beyond it.
Finally I began to walk, swinging my bag of shoes. I breathed deeply, inhaling the last of her smell, but it lingered, and after several more blocks I realized that what I smelled was not Amanda. It was myself, and this day of early summer—the fresh, snarled leaves and piles of sunlit dirt. I was almost fifteen years old.
EMERALD CITY
Rory knew before he came to New York what sort of life he would have. He’d read about it in novels by hip young authors who lived there. He saw the apartment, small but high-ceilinged, a tall, sooty window with a fire escape twisting past a chemical-pink sky. Nights in frantic clubs, mornings hunched over coffee in the East Village, warming his hands on the cup, black pants, black turtleneck, pointed black boots. He’d intended to snort cocaine, but by the time he arrived, that was out. He drank instead.
He was a photographer’s assistant, loading cameras all day, holding up light meters, waving Polaroids until they were dry enough to tear open. As he watched the models move, he sometimes worried he was still too California. What could you do with sandy blond hair, cut it off? Short hair was on the wane, at least for men. So there it hung, golden, straight as paper, reminiscent of beaches he’d never seen, being as he was from Chicago (in Chicago there was the lake, but that didn’t count). His other option was to gain or lose some weight, but the starved look had lost its appeal—any suggestion of illness was to be avoided. Beefy was the way to go; not fat, just a classic paunch above the belt. But no matter how much Rory ate, he stayed exactl
y the same. He took up smoking instead, although it burned his throat.
Rory stubbed out his cigarette and checked to make sure the lights were off in the darkroom. He was always the last to leave; his boss, Vesuvi, would hand him the camera as soon as the last shot was done and then swan out through the sea of film containers, plastic cups, and discarded sheets of backdrop paper. Vesuvi was one of those people who always had somewhere to go. He was blessed with a marvelous paunch, which Rory tried not to admire too openly. He didn’t want Vesuvi to get the wrong idea.
Rory swept the debris into bags, then he turned out the lights, locked up the studio, and headed down to the street. Twilight was his favorite hour—metal gates sliding down over storefronts, newspapers whirling from the sidewalk into the sky, an air of promise and abandonment. This was the way he’d expected New York to look, and he was thrilled when the city complied.
He took the subway uptown to visit Stacey, a failing model whom he adored against all reason. Stacey—when girls with names like Zane and Anouschka and Brid regularly slipped him their phone numbers during shoots. Stacey refused to change her name. “If I make it,” she said, “they’ll be happy to call me whatever.” She never acknowledged that she was failing, though it was obvious. Rory longed to bring it up, to talk it over with her, but he was afraid to.
Stacey lay on her bed, shoes still on. A Diet Coke was on the table beside her. She weighed herself each morning, and when she was under 120, she allowed herself a real Coke that day.
“What happened at Bazaar?” Rory asked, perching on the edge of the bed. Stacey sat up and smoothed her hair.
“The usual,” she said. “I’m too commercial.” She shrugged, but Rory could see she was troubled.
“And that was nothing,” Stacey continued. “On my next go-see the guy kept looking at me and flipping back and forth through my book, and of course I’m thinking, Fantastic, he’s going to hire me. So you know what he finally says? I’m not ugly enough. He says, ‘Beauty today is ugly beauty. Look at those girls, they’re monsters—gorgeous, mythical monsters. If a girl isn’t ugly, I won’t use her.’”
Emerald City Page 4
