Tiny Ladies

by Adam Klein

  ‘It’s comfortable,’ I say. ‘Should I get my tape recorder?’ I feel suddenly excited about it. ‘We should have music now, the right music.’

  I wander back to the car and pull my tape player from the front seat, and Dusty in Memphis from the glove compartment. It’s cued to my favorite song, ‘No Easy Way Down’. It was my mother’s favorite and now it’s mine. The small light in the roof of the car reminds me of when I lived in it. Of course I could fall asleep in that crane. I used to sleep on the side of the road in this car, a blue tarp pulled over me for camouflage. I could do anything, just not again. The car light illuminated the last veins, the new scars. And the maps I could barely hold, too high to trace a line, follow a course. Florida is there. San Francisco is there. And I am somewhere here. Yes, right here. Florida was gauze and heat, canals, slime, bloodsuckers and palmettos, displaced Indians and patriotic Cubans, mini-malls and prisons. Bloodsuckers. And San Francisco. What was San Francisco? Runaways. And Asian pharmacists who look at you sadly when you buy your syringes and make you sign in their books because you haven’t a diabetic card. Yes, their faces are expressive. Even if they don’t say a word to you. And San Francisco was casework, both sides of the desk. Isn’t there an expression: both sides of the law? The law of care. The bureaucracy of care. But I’m here now. Iowa. No different from Idaho for a lot of people. The I states.

  I slam the door and the light goes out.

  Now I hear my feet crunching over the ice. I see her profile high up in the crane. She can sit perfectly still. She has a sad type of beauty, so that you want to give her something. But then you suspect it won’t reach her, so you can only just take her as she is. Faces like hers, there’s a kind of determination about them. But it isn’t a hard face, just not completely open.

  And I suppose there’s something of Janine’s face in the way she holds her chin out, as though she has to be stoical even when she’s alone. She has to stand up to her own thoughts.

  I climb into the cabin and put the tape recorder between us, and the music gives our perch a lonelier, alien cast.

  ‘I love this tape,’ Hannah says, turning the cassette cover in her hands. ‘I didn’t know you liked Dusty Springfield. Her voice is so cool, and her emotions so raw.’

  Now you’re standing alone, and the past is unknown, and there is no easy way down.

  ‘I like music that helps me feel. I don’t always experience my feelings until it’s too late – when the circumstances have changed and the feelings no longer seem true.’

  ‘I always assume if I feel something, it’s true,’ Hannah says.

  ‘Yeah, and I’ll bet you met a lot of people in the hospital who were as certain as you.’ The moment I say it, I’m sorry. She sits quietly thinking about it, or the way my voice changed when I said it, like I was trying to protect something. My own certainty.

  ‘All I know,’ I say, ‘is that if I trusted my feelings I’d still be living the way I did. Everything in me told me there weren’t any options, and there was no reason to move on. I knew my life could always get worse, but it was certainly as bad as I could take. So I changed. I got in my car and I drove here, despite myself. I just put all those feelings on hold.’

  ‘I haven’t changed, Carrie. That’s my problem.’ Hannah’s eyes flash, trapped and guarded.

  ‘I somehow doubt you’d be the best judge of that’ – talking like a caseworker again.

  ‘But if I can’t see it, it isn’t worth anything, is it?’ she asks.

  Her question startles me. It is so full of resignation, like a prayer no one should overhear. And yet I know it from inside, a place you can find for yourself where nothing is available. Perfectly smooth walls, mirror-smooth.

  ‘I guess that’s where faith comes in. I mean, there’s a reason why the most damaged find comfort in it.’

  ‘Maybe I’m just not damaged enough,’ she says. ‘It brings me no comfort. But then again, maybe I’m not the best judge of how damaged I am.’ She laughs, a brittle, broken sound. Then abruptly turning her body to face me: ‘So what’s your story? What makes a smart, pretty woman get in her car and drive to the middle of nowhere?’

  You don’t need to tell your story to get theirs …

  ‘I guess I’ve been running for a long time,’ I say, ‘looking for a place where there are no emergencies. It’s not like I had any great expectations when I came here. My family weren’t exactly planners. In fact, my home was one of the first things that just kind of dissolved. I wasn’t really a runaway; there was just nothing to go back to. I celebrated my sixteenth birthday in an outreach office for troubled teens. That was like 1976. I hitchhiked to San Francisco and arrived penniless. I didn’t know a soul. And I was hungry. Hungry and wet, because it was pouring out. My father was in jail – he still is – and my mother is an addict. So that’s how I had my first taste of casework. I wanted a meal, that’s all. And I had this counselor who understood me.’

  Then there’s the story I don’t tell, not aloud, not to anyone: Where I took my training from, and where my training took me. I could tell the story if it was, in fact, my past. But I don’t have that kind of separation yet. Sitting with Hannah outside the office feels familiar, a repetition. This is, after all, what I did with Victor; I stepped outside the office and outside the roles. It’s a common story – not knowing how to live, making the wrong decisions, the same ones, more than once. But how can you ted? If the wrong decisions identified themselves, there wouldn’t be any decision, would there? The story I can’t tell Hannah is what brings us together now. And when I think of the loneliness that made me call her – how it seemed to invest the walls of my cottage – it seems unreal, and how could I describe it? It’s a loneliness you don’t forget, like the hunger I felt that day, waiting to see a counselor in San Francisco. It bends you completely around it, distorts you. That kind of loneliness is a sound wall.

  My counselor took an interest in me immediately. He was young, but he could convince me of anything. I trusted his authority, that he was looking out for my best interests. Best interests – they were always either mine or his – and somehow locked together from the moment I’d sat at his desk and told him I had no food, no job, no friends. He took me to dinner that night and explained we’d have to be quiet about it. I was prepared to keep secrets. I was determined to survive.

  My counselor’s name was Bill Avery. He was born on Martha’s Vineyard, and he had blue, blue, calm eyes. A shore of regret in those calm eyes, and a mirror there too. When he talked to me, I didn’t notice the cafeteria we were eating in, the dead eyes of the women behind the counter, the gray lamb rotating on a skewer, the people in line behind us – many on canes, carrying bottles. The place was close to his job, but also close to where he lived. Just two buildings down, he pointed.

  And in his little room, in a gray tower on Eddy Street, for the first time I felt I’d conquered the one-way glass that kept me separated from others all those years.

  He asked me why I came to San Francisco. San Francisco was a fluke, a place I’d heard my mother talk about. She said my father gave her the choice when they’d just been married: earthquakes or hurricanes. She chose hurricanes. That’s all you’re given, sometimes – a choice of disasters. I got up and looked out his window at the strange California sunlight that made the white buildings glisten like a mirage. Below, I could see people rushing by, lining up for the disbursement of their General Assistance checks; the lights of the porn theaters on the corner, lurid even in daylight when you could see the pigeons roosting between the tubes.

  Bill stood behind me, and I felt his hand firmly on my back, rubbing it with a persistence that demanded nothing. I felt safe beside him, rescued. Looking out his window reminded me of my father. I wondered if he had a window in prison to look out of. It’s one of those luxuries I don’t take for granted, even now. Bill suggested I consider a hotel to stay in. He told me he could help me find a job, get me vouchers for rent. In the meantime, I could stay the night.
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  What happened between Bill and me never seemed other than normal. His asking me to stay was an act of generosity. His asking me to keep it quiet, familiar. That night he explored me with his hands, touching me with a peculiar bashfulness. ‘Lie on your back,’ he suggested. I felt his fingers, butterfly-like along the insides of my legs. ‘What are you laughing at?’ he asked. He sounded serious, so I held my breath, the laughter moving throughout me, mixing with the shame and the fear. No one had ever touched me so lightly.

  The sky turned colors outside the window – dark blue streaked with orange and pink, some kind of magnificent ice cream. He stood up after a while and took his pants off. He wasn’t wearing underwear, and I noticed his penis wasn’t hard. It was strange then. He’d driven my sexuality to the surface, and now it felt like a layer of nerves exposed over my skin. I felt vulnerable and alone in it, the way I had when I inhaled my father as he slept beside me. I was afraid he’d tell me this couldn’t happen, the way Jim had. I always did want to tell Jim: This did happen, and this is happening. But it was too late. Jim had simply taken it all back. I’m still amazed that people can do that.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said.

  It had always been my greatest fear – someone reading my thoughts. So many of them seemed impossible to explain or express, or just so fleeting they would die in the light. Mostly there was a big silence in me, and the thoughts that came surprised me too.

  ‘I like it when you just touch me,’ I said. But he knew I wanted to know why he wasn’t aroused. And maybe he knew I’d be happy with any excuse.

  ‘I take a medicine that doesn’t always let me show what I’m feeling.’ He got in the bed next to me, and a sense of relief came over me, flooding me with a drug-like calm. I told him I didn’t want sex with him. But as he continued to stroke me, his eyes shut and his breathing sounded almost like a low growl. I let my own fingers direct the current in my body he’d located just minutes before.

  When the alarm went off the next morning, Bill was already awake, sitting in a chair by the window, just his socks on. His belt hung around his arm. ‘Damn,’ he said. ‘Fucking alarm.’ I didn’t tell him I’d seen it before. I just kept my head down on the pillow, followed him with my eyes. ‘You might want to look away,’ he said. I didn’t. I watched closely as the blood registered startlingly bright in the syringe.

  ‘There it goes,’ he said breathlessly and trailing off, both a comment on the rush and something he’d let go of.

  ‘I’m sorry, Carrie. I didn’t want you to know this about me so soon.’ He began cleaning up around him, putting his glass of water and spoon in the sink as though it were a coffee mug.

  He closed the curtain behind him. A creamy, yellow light came through it, though it was only 7:30 A.M. ‘You sleep,’ he said. ‘Come visit me at work. And lock the door behind you.’

  Soon I would bring his syringes to work. Though I understood what it meant to be secretive, I didn’t take his needs seriously enough. ‘Why were you late?’ he’d ask. ‘There’s nothing to hold you up when you’re bringing this to me. Always consider this an emergency. No matter how often you do it. The more you do it, the greater the emergency.’

  He gave me stamped letters that enabled me to get clothes from nuns in dusty church-run shops. The letters said something about interview clothes, but I’d argue for what I wanted regardless of whether it looked like something I could wear to a job. Bill didn’t care. He cut me checks for rent that went straight to his own landlord from my hands. The landlord did junk too, so they understood each other. Bill set up interviews for jobs he thought I’d be good at. I went to a few of them; others I’d simply forget. It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate him. While we were together I saw no reason to work. I had no skills. And though I had no shame when I walked into a store with a voucher, I felt humiliated asking someone to pay for my training. What could I possibly bring to anyone that would be worth paying for? What could I learn? It was a question I never asked Bill, and maybe one of the reasons he failed as a job counselor. But he tried. He thought I’d make a good waitress, that I could talk to people.

  Watching Bill work filled me with conflicting feelings. I was proud of his ability, the desk he managed and the official paperwork he was always filling out. He seemed to possess a kind of mastery over his own life when he helped others. But I also felt indebted and damaged. I tried to imagine myself doing what Bill did, learning the forms and saying the right things to people. But it seemed like an entirely different world, full of somberness and regret, sometimes punctuated by the joy of somebody finding a job. I never asked Bill about what it required to be a case manager, whether you had to take a class or take an oath. He was taking care of me, and I couldn’t upset that balance by asking him how he’d learned to do it.

  Janine went with me to look for clothes a few times. I always thought she had a great sense of style, just the way she held herself. She could wear a man’s V-neck T-shirt and make it look like she’d spent a lot of money on it. She told me that her mother had a lot of money, and that’s why she hated designer clothes. She was already punk, totally fed up with the veneer of money and taste. She got a kick out of the vouchers Bill gave me. It was a challenge to find things at cheap department stores and at church rummage shops.

  Bill introduced us, but didn’t like us hanging around together that much. She was on his caseload for a little while. I would have been jealous of her if Bill hadn’t told me he found her hard to be with. He said she was arrogant, and that she lied. I just thought she knew what she wanted. It certainly wasn’t any of the jobs he tried to send her on. She would tell him that she’d gone to an interview, then fall silent when he inquired further.

  She did go to interviews with me, though, and I liked her company. She’d sit outside, smoking, listening to her Walkman. ‘I hope you didn’t get it,’ she’d say. ‘This place is so depressing – all that fake, optimistic Americana crap makes me sick.’ I looked again at the restaurant, with its faux ‘50s diner decor, its pink and blue neon illuminating pale waiters and waitresses running with heavy trays or listlessly refilling ketchup bottles in its carnival light.

  Janine knew right away where we could fit in, and where we couldn’t. It seemed to me to be the most essential knowledge to have. And when, five years later, she took me to my first audition as a stripper, I trusted her that this was somewhere we wouldn’t have to be anything other than ourselves.

  While Bill and I were together, I never told him that Janine was stripping. He believed in earning an honest wage. That included his drug dealer, but not strippers. I thought his opinion about stripping was his way of keeping me close, watching over me.

  When Janine asked if I loved Bill, I told her with certainty, yes. I laugh now. The less I knew, the more certain I was. A counselor at the hospital rehab once asked me, ‘Did you know that Bill molested you? Did you realize you were sexually abused?’ The questions made no sense to me. Had he forgotten who I was, misplaced my chart? Bill did not molest me. And though I was young, I wasn’t a child. I was sixteen. I’d seen my household disintegrate, and I forged another. He did the same thing. But later, when I thought about it, I realized that Bill was a thief, an addict – another father to me. It wasn’t necessarily a good thing, but it was what we both knew how to do, and there was comfort in that.

  And so it made sense when he encouraged me to go visit my mother after her surgery. He could be very firm about family things. ‘Loyalty,’ he’d say, ‘is the most important thing between people.’

  I sat at his desk, and he cut me the last check for bus fare to Miami. ‘Say good-bye to your history as a client here.’ We’d used up whatever state resources were allocated for a single woman on his caseload. He rolled up my folder and discreetly slipped it into his bag. It was that simple then. In that unwieldy bureaucracy in the late ‘70s, there was little accounted for. Almost seven years later, when I began working in a different division for the same office, there were still easy
ways to cover your tracks.

  That night I watched him cook up over his shoulder. ‘You want to try it?’ he asked. It seemed odd at first that he wanted to introduce me to what he both cursed and loved. In retrospect, this may have been his way of continuing to minister to me since I was officially no longer his client.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. I had no idea this decision would bring me back to him, again and again. Look what they’ve done to my brain, Ma. Look what they’ve done to my brain. Well, they picked it like a chicken bone and I guess I’m half insane, Ma.

  When every song was a mirror, we still didn’t believe it. We sang it louder, like it was a joke. A mean, vicious joke. It was my mother’s brain. A stroke – my father wrote from prison – something serious and no money to pay for it.

  My mother was still in the hospital when I arrived in Miami. I took a cab and got there just before the end of visiting hours. I went to the woman at reception. She was pretty, sitting with her head in her hands, bored. She looked me up and down, then pointed me to a set of elevators. I rode up, the ambivalence setting in stronger than at any time during my preparation for the trip. I thought I would tell my mother that I’d made a life for myself in San Francisco. I’d tell her about Bill. Not everything – just that I’d been taken care of. But I felt unsure of what this information would mean to her – did it matter if I was doing well? That I’d found someone? My father insisted it would.

  Of course it will, of course it does. But I couldn’t take anything for granted. I wasn’t sure if I cared about my mother’s well-being, whether I wanted to forgive, or be forgiven. I felt strangely unconvincing, nobody’s daughter. I looked at my reflection in the streaky metal doors of the elevator, and my body seemed too small to be the person I felt it necessary to be. I was relieved when the doors opened on the fourth floor.