Tiny Ladies

by Adam Klein

  The traffic was moving rapidly, but I’d have to drive more quickly to crash the barriers. And as I looked out, my mind engrossed in the calculations, the wheels cut along the edge of the walk zone and I momentarily lost the wheel. And then instinct, and not will at all, pulled the car back into control. Blind instinct. Heart, lungs, adrenaline – the parts of me I had no control over – had kept me alive, countered the chemicals I’d used to slow them, submerge them, kill them. The mechanism, and not the will, survived and saved me.

  Hannah and I lie head to head on the rug, both of us stroking King. I am not lonely, but calm. Hannah rolls onto her back. She plays with the pulls in her light blue sweater.

  ‘I guess I always wonder what’s a fair amount to ask to be forgiven for.’ Her voice sounds very far away, but still clear.

  ‘Always ask for more than you need,’ I say.

  She’s quiet for a moment. She measures her confession. She’s a smart girl.

  ‘Ellen stood there, and I don’t think she was explaining why she’d taken the car – that wasn’t her way – but I think she told him where we’d taken it. And I thought of how I would tell about the excursion, about the young boy at the gas station, and how he’d assumed we were capable of anything. It was a great prank. That boy had such fear in his eyes. But Stefan led Ellen into his house, looking skeptically over his shoulder at me. I guess he figured it was my doing, that it was my decision to take his keys and go out driving. It was easier to hate me. The funny thing was, I also wanted his forgiveness.’ She rolled over again and looked at me. ‘I wished I’d never felt that. If I had just walked away, without jealousy – that’s what it was – then Ellen might have had what she wanted. That perfect life she wanted.’

  ‘Wasn’t he married?’ I ask.

  ‘She would have had him; the marriage wouldn’t have stopped him. But later, she started really pursuing him – crazily – and he felt threatened by her. He was the kind of guy that always wanted to be the aggressor. He was a womanizer. He liked that control. And she was a skillful little girl, the perfect match for him.’ She looked up at me angrily. ‘I didn’t kill her, Carrie. But I wanted to hurt her. When I got out of the car and walked away from his house, I knew she’d let him hate me. I knew she’d let him blame me. I shouldn’t have cared what he thought, but I did.’

  I imagine myself sitting in that theater south of Market Street in San Francisco. And Janine’s play. What was it called? Saved? It ran for a week, but the reviews were good. Of course, she hadn’t invited me. She’d relied on the assumption that I wouldn’t pick up a weekly, see it advertised or reviewed, or that I’d died. My death was probably easier and more satisfying an assumption. I was high at the show because directly after I had to dance, and that was impossible to do clean. But from the moment the lights went up, it felt as though a spotlight were trained on me; I felt more naked and exposed than I’d ever felt on the tables of the O’Farrell. When I danced, I was clothed in persona. I knew what I was showing. You want to see my teeth, here’s my teeth. Don’t look at the arms, look at the eyes. The eyes, so stupid and small. A pigeon’s eyes.

  The girl on stage staggered and spoke with a rasp. She was one of many girls on the stage, all of them with story lines as heavy and artificial as their makeup. Janine built their characters from glitches and derailments. They dumbly follow a course of errors, perpetually startled or numbed by the outcomes. They’re conscious only of themselves as fringe-dwellers – because they’re strippers, addicts, low-lives – and they dress the part. They never come offstage. They expire slowly. The spectacle they present is hypnotic but not compelling. Bad actresses, bad idea. Good girls playing bad. Janine should’ve played the role. Perhaps by then it would have been acting to her. But her story is always in her eyes. That’s the part being clean doesn’t change.

  When I walked out of the theater, I pulled my coat around me. I was so angry at first. Then I couldn’t stop laughing. I was laughing even when I walked into the O’Farrell. ‘It’s art,’ I thought. ‘She really made something of herself.’

  I get up and offer Hannah tea. I go to the kitchen to make it. I have a light blue teapot, and when I add the water to the tea the smell of bergamot settles me. I call her in to look at the teacups. While she turns one in her hand, I tell her, ‘I love the things you can find here. In San Francisco, you could never find things like this in the thrift shops. Everything was picked over.’

  It reminds me of the cookie box she made for me. It’s fragile like that. And for a few moments we talk about the things that could content us, and how they’re rare things, from a different time.

  II

  Owls

  4

  Everything that has been put together decays and disintegrates, everything that has been united dissolves, everything created disappears.

  Severo Sarduy

  ‘Janine forgot where she came from. And she needs to remember that walking away isn’t as easy as she thinks.’ Did I say that? And what had Victor planned? And what part of the plan went so wrong? You see, you’re always alone. And that’s how people get in trouble: They don’t think alike, but they think they do.

  The office is dead. I feel Frances’s hand on my shoulder. Not her hand – her nails. They are long and thickly painted. When she holds a cigarette to her mouth, the nails extend across her cheek like deep, red cuts. ‘Let’s go outside,’ she says.

  We stand out by the parking lot and she looks at me for a long time without talking. ‘You seem distracted today,’ she says carefully. ‘Are you distracted?’

  ‘This winter’s hard for me. I think it’s the winter.’ Snow is falling again, and now it seems it will never clear.

  ‘That’s Iowa,’ she says dispassionately. ‘Is that all that’s on your mind?’

  I stop myself. ‘It’s not important.’

  ‘I’m not stupid,’ Frances says. ‘I’ve spent a lot of years here, and I know when something’s the matter. But I’m not saying you have to tell me. I just know.’

  ‘My client missed her appointment.’

  ‘They always do,’ she said. ‘Nothing strange about that.’

  ‘But I care about this one.’

  ‘Not good.’ She shakes her head. ‘You’ve got to watch yourself. That’s the kind of person you are. You mean the best, but you get too deep.’

  She goes back to that point. She doesn’t think there’s a difference between depths. Deep is deep. Stay afloat. She doesn’t know about loneliness. She is already out of here, setting up a new home with a man she trusts. She is on the phone all the time. Her voice is always full of interest. People interest her, at a distance. Don’t get dark on me. Don’t tell me about winter. I’ve seen winter.

  Victor wasn’t a good client. I remember when he’d first come into the office. He was mandated by furlough, and his attitude was as thick as his arms. ‘Nice-looking lady,’ he said – or something like that – as though he were talking to someone in his wolf pack. But he was alone and looked sort of nervous and self-conscious in the chair.

  Hernandez-Lopez, Victor. Served seven years, assault, possession with intent to sell. And on and on.

  He conveyed his story either with indifference or as a boast. I looked at his face and I could see his mother, still in Cuba. Her eyes were pistachio green, and her cheekbones high and delicate. These he had. He had his father’s scar, just below the eye; his father’s broken nose that looked flat, like a boxer’s. He had the distance between his estranged parents in his eyes. Light eyes, black hair. And his chin where he stored his pride, and his neck where the rage rose to the surface. But it was his lips that could talk of love and vengeance with the same whispered intensity.

  ‘What are you going to do for me?’ he asked.

  ‘If you keep your appointments, then I won’t notify parole. If you don’t, you’ll be visiting your old cell.’ I knew it was best to start by breaking things down into simple components: action equals consequence in this relationship. There was nothing I
had to do; he, however, was mandated to see me.

  He should have known I would keep that leverage. He could not take that from me. I had earned my place at the desk. I’d seen clients – one after the other – stay out or go back in, and my case report was an important component of that decision. I’d started early. It was probably just those few words that I’d exchanged with a police officer in my backyard that had years ago helped them apprehend my father. That was the first, but not the last time I would introduce the men I loved to corrections.

  ‘I’m from Miami,’ he answered when I asked his birthplace.

  I held up the alligator and told him of this first thing we shared in common.

  ‘I grew up in Sweetwater,’ I said.

  ‘I know where that is. I used to pass it on my way to the Everglades. I’ve seen a lot of bigger ‘gators than this.’ He took my hand in his as though to extricate the alligator from my grasp, but he didn’t take it, just let his hand settle on mine until I drew away.

  He said, ‘My father had an air boat we used to go out in. He had a lot of money, my father. He married another woman in Miami, and she just used it all up. Suddenly they had this big house, and all this security. She hated me, so my father asked me not to come around. I used to just look at that house through the gates. Once I saw her come out the front door. She saw my car and she went back inside right away. And I thought: She better not come out of there again. She was like a prisoner of her expensive house. She was afraid of me because she knew she tore my father and me apart.’

  The threat of him. Was it authentic? Should the words ‘assault’ and ‘possession’ make the threat of him authentic? But his charm is tied to his threat. For women like me.

  There are extra locks on my cottage door. First paycheck in Iowa: security. But you can’t buy that feeling, and the locks remind you.

  I call Hannah at the end of the day. ‘You didn’t come in,’ I say. ‘I was worried. You didn’t call.’

  ‘I left a message at your house this morning. I just thought,’ and she is thinking now, measuring, ‘since we’re friends now, maybe we don’t need to see each other in the office.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I say stiffly. ‘I’ll close your case.’ But I close off the structure and open the inevitable. Close the structure, open the inevitable.

  ‘Anyway, I called to invite you over,’ she says. ‘If you’re not doing anything after work.’

  When I leave the office, Frances turns in her rolling chair. ‘No good-bye?’ she asks.

  ‘Good-bye,’ and I waver there, knowing if I shared any of this with her, she would surely be disappointed and alarmed.

  There is a carpeted stairway up to her apartment on the third floor. My footsteps sink into it, silenced. She is standing, welcoming in the doorway. ‘Come in,’ she says. The apartment is dim and cluttered. I sit on a wooden chair, but it’s comfortable. And her oven door is open, giving more heat. She is sitting, facing me.

  ‘Well, this is it.’

  ‘It’s nice,’ I say. ‘You have so much in here.’

  ‘You want to see?’ She stands up and points to a painting, high on a wall, boxes underneath. ‘This one’s Ellen’s.’ There’s a girl in bed, blankets pulled up to her chin, the ominous shadow of scissors stretching over the wall.

  ‘Creepy. When did she paint that?’

  ‘Later. It’s creepy unless you know the story. You notice her braid? It’s the dread of a haircut that’s being conveyed, but in a very Gothic way. Or maybe a Freudian way. But that’s what the painting’s about – at least, that’s what she said.

  ‘Here’s one of mine.’ She points to a lurid, thickly painted canvas that looks like a doll’s body with a smeary head, as though the face were in motion or agony. And the chest is flat, the background falling into pitch.

  A feeling closes me off – a sense of dread in realizing that I don’t know her – having brought this stranger into my life. I recognize a dangerous willingness in myself that I thought I’d lost. A dangerous trust. Like most, I guess. But I think: It’s not so creepy when you know the back story, when you’re familiar with its depths.

  ‘This one’s pretty dark, I guess.’

  ‘But it’s good,’ I say, looking closer. ‘They’re both really good.’

  ‘Do you paint, Carrie?’

  ‘No. I used to draw a lot. And I’ve always looked at paintings. I always felt I could appreciate them without being able to really talk about them. It’s like music. You don’t have to know about music to like it, but people think different about something in a frame.’

  There are records in boxes. Hundreds of them. ‘I have a lot of music,’ she says. ‘Listen to this.’

  She pulls out Pere Ubu, Tuxedomoon, Suicide. I sit on the edge of her bed looking at the covers, and the music comes on with ferocity. ‘Non-Alignment Pact,’ she says, and begins dancing. I wanna make a deal with you, girl. Get it signed by the heads of state …

  ‘Dance with me,’ she says, and it is like my mother, her movements slower than the beat suggests. At first I’m self-conscious dancing with her, but she brings me out. We lift our shoes higher off the carpet so we can hear our feet connect to the floor. We adopt similar steps, both of us jerking our arms, glancing at each other only for instants at a time. She becomes frenetic, smeary. And when the song ends, she grabs my hands and laughs. Her eyes are bright and magnificent. We’re both flushed, breathing heavy. But she puts on another record, and away we go.

  After that, I throw myself on her bed, winded. She drops beside me. Still smiling, she says, ‘I’m on acid, you know.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘It’s really good. You want some?’ She is already going to the refrigerator where she keeps it. ‘I know the guy who makes it.’ She takes it out of the Saran Wrap and drops three hits of black blotter on my lap.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t do drugs any more.’ I say it tenderly, carefully. Not to upset her.

  ‘But it’s acid,’ she says. ‘It’s really good.’ She says it coaxing, and so innocent. Turn on a dime. Inevitability.

  I sit rigidly, silent. And the old mechanisms turn on, a cold machine that instantly grows hot. This isn’t heroin or cocaine. Acid isn’t addictive. And the loudest thought: don’t be alone now. ‘Oh, all right.’ And I put the blotter under my tongue until I can taste it, and it almost makes me gag. I swallow the rest.

  ‘Here’s some orange juice,’ she says. ‘It’s easier with juice.’

  We sit listening to the music, and the room is like a messy painting, the sound infusing it with color and shadow. ‘Doesn’t that sound great?’ she asks, lying beside me, and her voice is very far away but clear. This is a cathedral and a train station, somewhere dark and underground, now bright as a tree house. Our bodies swim over the ceiling, and the room turns and changes.

  ‘God, I love this,’ I say, my voice thick and foreign.

  She’s laughing, and I crawl up to touch her arm, find out what she’s laughing about. I bring my eyes to her lips and whisper into her neck, ‘What are you—’

  I feel her hands on my face; they are my face, my contours, tears. Like tiny ladies. I feel like I’m a tiny lady walking away from my mother’s care. I see myself walking into pitch, but I’m not crying. Or am I? Into her hands …

  And the quilt on Hannah’s bed is hand-stitched. A woman with time, sitting very still in her body, making this for warm sleep, to wrap another in. When you’re sitting very alone and still in your own body you can make these gifts, and you need not give them away. And the music has that density and warmth, and you can burrow into it and lose yourself at its center. I don’t know how long we stay there, or if I’m crying. But her body tells me it doesn’t matter.

  ‘Do you want to go outside?’ she asks after some time.

  ‘What time is it?’ I ask.

  ‘I think after eleven. It should be pretty quiet out, and I know a good walk.’

  We begin the slow process of putting on coats and
mufflers and gloves. We are completely concentrated on locating and figuring out our items of clothing. It’s not an anxious concentration, but languorous and personal, as though each of us were preparing for an intimate date with winter.

  Outside, everything has a crisp, fresh look about it. I can feel both of us entering a new dream where our energy doesn’t threaten to wake us but enables us to navigate the vivid dark. We both watch as a plastic bag is kicked up by the wind and carried down the street like an airborne jellyfish. Under the last streetlight, she turns toward me and gathers my scarf around my neck. ‘Do you like it?’ she asks.

  And though I’m unsure of what she’s asking specifically, I say, ‘yes.’

  We make our way up a quiet street with just a house light here or there, and finally come upon an expanse of snow with no houses nearby. We lie in it, feeling it for the first time, knowing if we pushed our hands under it we could pull them out transformed. We have to float on the snow, and the feeling of its movement beneath us makes us both laugh. And then I go very deep into myself, leaving her laughter like a safety rope I can rejoin later, and begin to recognize the perfect reflection I see in the branches of a barren tree, strong in its nakedness, but awaiting its cover of leaves. When I sit up, I notice she’s gone.

  I spend a long time standing and waiting, until the question ‘What are you doing here?’ gets too loud in my head, and I begin to walk. And as I walk, my mind finds its way to Victor. And again, I cannot shut it out. Because this is one of the first nights I’ve found myself walking alone late at night. Since Victor, I’ve carefully monitored myself, devising well-lit paths to follow, even planning variations on each path so my comings and goings wouldn’t fall into the inevitable patterns. Staying home in the evenings happened naturally. I think I displaced the fears of my personal darkness on the night. Now, night intimidates me with its ambiguities, its suggestions. So I start walking, fearful of shadows, not as strong as that tree. And it occurs to me I might not be able to speak if I were to run into somebody. I might not be able to run if I see Victor. But of course he can’t come here, unless he’s been released. And that is always possible, even probable. Because there is just not enough space to house them. Too many prisoners. Too many predators. And I wonder if Janine imagined she would ever be harmed in the Summer House, each day one day further from the past. Now, fear crowds at the corner of my journey and remorse follows it, spreads uncontrollably through my stomach and rises to my heart. The remorse asks: ‘Now you have done this acid, what else will you do? How long before you’re on the wheel again? How long before you have a needle in your arm? And will you die this time, running the wheel?’