Harmless Like You

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

“That you’re a loser who never leaves her room.”

  Odile did not take off the dress, but fell down on the bed in a sprawl. Her green shoes knocked against Yuki. Odile was spiteful, but so what. She was fine without either boy. She had a job. She would have lunch with Lou tomorrow. She slept and dreamt of alligators.

  After the first two days, Yuki fell smoothly into the rhythm. Even Emileen’s 3:30 call was routine. She’d ask to be put through; Yuki denied her, Yuki listened to Emileen catch her breath and spill it in rolling sobs, ten minutes passed, and Emileen hung up. Someone hung red and green lights about the office. Two of the journalists carried in a tree. It stood in the corner of the reception, along with a battered menorah. Yuki wondered if she’d have to buy Lillian a gift.

  The next Monday, Lou was triumphant at lunch because a think piece he’d written had made it out of Sports and into the Editorial. Something about a boxer who wouldn’t fight in the war.

  “Why aren’t you fighting?”

  “Me? Flat-footed, nearsighted, high blood pressure, asthmatic, left-handed. The cripples’ll need someone to pick on when they get back.” His smirk pulled her into this alliance of the weak. He offered her the end of his pastrami and mayo. The crust was ragged and the mayonnaise had soaked into the bread; it sagged at the middle.

  “But you called him a coward?” She was speaking about the boxer. “And isn’t The Paper against the war?”

  “It’s easier to fill a page with fury than applause. As Lillian would say, an ovation lasts a minute, a riot a fortnight.”

  “Why doesn’t she talk like a normal person?”

  “It’s complicated.” Sure, everything was complicated. Lou bent forward, tucking his fingers under her chin. He smelled of garlic and hair oil. “Seriously though, I think the cowards are the ones over there killing harmless little girls like you.”

  Yuki touched her cheek. Harmless little girls like me. She thought of the corporals coming to say farewell in their brass buttons.

  “They’re killing civilians. They’re killing girls with this hair and those eyes.” He ran his index finger over her right eyelid. He made a lazy arc along her cold skin. She felt her chin tilting up into the warm point. “Cowards.”

  “Got to get back,” she said. Yuki stood up fast, suddenly woozy.

  After that, Yuki paid more attention to the young men who came and sat in the lobby’s orange plastic chairs. The boys with name tags stitched into their new uniforms, the captains, sailors with the silver-screen swagger, the doctors whose faces said they might still die, the ambulance men, the students wrapped safe in their PhDs. All types came to escort their girls out to Christmas cheer.

  Some of them flirted while they waited. They asked how a little thing like her came to have a job. She answered the hippies, the doctors and the students. The soldiers made her stutter. She wondered about guns and the good-time girls from Vietnam. She read reports of the war, not for the soldier boy who’d ran his hands up her legs, but for the “little girls.” Photographs of her aunts, grandmothers, great-aunts had stood on her parents’ offering table. Yuki saw their faces tearing, burning, and the light reflected in the eyes of these Camel-smoking, Coke-drinking, gum-chewing boys. Using The Paper’s stationery, she sketched the men, under the table. She tried to catch the folds of their hats and the gleaming dots of their eyes. At the end of the day, she dropped the penciled platoon into the waste paper.

  Back at the apartment, she took a hot bath, trying to dissolve her bones. The twelve-hour night passed in two blinks. She dropped on to the bed at seven and blinked into consciousness as Odile landed at midnight. The streetlights turned Odile’s thighs into gold lozenges. Then Yuki blinked awake in time for work.

  She’d been working three weeks when she was called in to see the editor-in-chief. She’d never spoken to him before, other than to say: X is here to see you. Y rang, please call her back.

  In each corner of the editor-in-chief’s office, an electric heater bared its glowing orange bars. His dirty windows were streaked with bird shit. His desk was low and covered in copy. This wasn’t The Times. There was no mahogany or baize within thirty feet of The Paper’s offices.

  The editor was chubby, and his skin was the gray-white of newsprint. Yuki thought she should tell Emileen that he wasn’t worth it. But who was Yuki to say? She thought of the white calcium comets on Lou’s pink nails, and of beautiful sad Lillian. New York roiled with secret hates and loves. Yuki knew what it was to be alone and didn’t blame Emileen for clutching to what was hers in any way she could.

  “Why did I ever move to the States?” The editor was British. “Just got over fucking summer and now this.” He rolled his wide shoulders in an exaggerated shudder. “Emileen isn’t coming back,” he said.

  “Emileen—” It wasn’t a question, but that was how he took it.

  “The girl who worked reception before you.”

  “Is she okay? Did something happen to her?”

  “Of course. She married a doctor, and she’s moving to Connecticut to plant cuttings and thicken her waist.”

  “Oh.” It didn’t make any sense, but she reminded herself the editor was a journalist, so of course he was a smooth liar.

  “So you can stay on.”

  “I’ve got to get back to school.”

  He looked at her; it was the look she imagined he gave sources. His eyes widened to their rims. He pulled his head back into his neck, piling the flesh into rolls. He looked like a pug. A hungry pug trying to decide if it should risk swallowing a large grape. As if it had not quite decided whether grapes were edible. Yuki wanted to laugh; she felt it tickling the bottom of her stomach. She coughed, and looked down at her shoes. The soles were rubbing away.

  “Why? I quit, at sixteen. Met Marilyn Monroe before she died. She bought me a drink. Do you think that’s going to happen in a classroom?” He added, “Marilyn quit at sixteen too.” Yuki was seventeen.

  “But, I don’t want to be a reporter. Or an actress.”

  “What do you want to be?”

  “An artist.” She said it without thinking, though of course she knew she wouldn’t be. She would go to college, not Harvard, but somewhere, go back to Japan, marry a nice boy—it was all planned out. Still it was nice to pretend she had a choice.

  “They teaching you that there?”

  “No. Not really.” She loved her art teacher. But all they did was paint flowers, glass bottles, grocery-store still lives of apples and onions. There had to be more to art than that.

  “Then sit at my front desk, answer the telephone, tell people the editor will be with them shortly. There’s a raise and it’s got to be better than whatever those morons are shoving down your throat.”

  “Let me think about it?”

  “Tell me by Christmas.” Christmas Day was the only day the journalists took off. “Now, go on, shoo.”

  Yuki sat at reception, flipping the idea over. She wasn’t sure why she had asked to think about it; why should she stay when all the other girls snubbed her? Her father wouldn’t allow it. Her parents still called every Saturday, but international dialing was expensive and so the conversations were telegraphic. Yet she always ran out of things to say. They wouldn’t understand why she’d stay at The Paper. Perhaps she could ask Odile?

  By Saturday, Yuki had still said nothing to Odile about the job. And anyway, what was she supposed to say to someone who kicked off her gold heels at 3 a.m. I’m trying to choose between being ignored at high school and being ignored in an office. Yuki might once have asked that but the Nothing had changed; the long black shadow it cast had disappeared and now it was glossy and transparent as a store window. Through the new Nothing, Odile was glimmering but untouchable. She treated Yuki like any other lackey. On Saturday, Odile pushed a Polaroid camera into Yuki’s hands.

  “I need to know which outfits work on camera,” she said as if this were part of a continuing conversation and not the first words she’d addressed to Yuki all week.

&nbs
p; Yuki dragged open all the windows of the apartment. The glass was gray with dirt, and they needed as much light as possible.

  “Green suits me. Well, some greens. This green: olive. Not forest. Forest washes me out.” Odile lifted the hem of her dress to her cheek, revealing her underwear and the craters in her tights.

  “What about . . .?” Yuki held up a Polaroid.

  Odile took it. “Oh no.”

  The Polaroids were laid out on the table. Moving from left to right, Odile appeared to be fading away, when actually she was still developing. In several, she was out of focus, a smear of green and gold, black and blue. A human bruise.

  “But I thought you looked nice.”

  “I’ll return it on Monday.”

  The olive was the last of the dresses. Lillian was out drinking mimosas with her girlfriends, and so Yuki and Odile had spread the dresses across the entire floor. There was a heap to keep and a heap to return. The heap to keep came to Yuki’s knees.

  “Can you afford these?” Yuki asked.

  “Look in my bag, not that one, that one. Can you find my purse?”

  Yuki pulled it out.

  “Open it.”

  Yuki read the white check. It was more than she’d made in two weeks of picking up the telephone.

  “And anyway if I need extra spending money, he helps. He likes me looking nice. It’s important for my career.”

  Yuki knew who he was and knew Odile was lucky that this man had discovered her. But Odile’s submission frightened Yuki. On the fire escape, Odile had been so assured. Yuki had gone home and practiced holding her own chin at that proud angle. Now, Odile had learned to roll over and beg. It was right there in the word discovered, as if Odile was a lost dog roaming the streets before she’d been found.

  “Hey,” Yuki began.

  “Hey, yourself.”

  “If you weren’t a model, what would you do?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Probably travel. Follow a band for a while.”

  “I meant with your life?”

  Odile shrugged elegantly and the unzipped dress fell from her shoulders.

  “I was thinking of maybe quitting school . . .” Odile wasn’t going to college. Yuki’s mother hadn’t gone to college. Lillian hadn’t gone to college. Why should Yuki stay in school?

  A drumming sounded against the apartment’s door. The buzzer had died years ago. For a moment the two girls paused, looked at each other. Odile pulled the olive dress up from around her feet like a film playing in reverse. She went to the door. It was Lou.

  “Your mom invited me for dinner.” He didn’t even look at Yuki.

  At the apartment, Lou was different from at the office; he took up more space. Yuki felt unsure of the protocol for managing these two Lous. So behind Odile’s back, she tweaked her face into a tense half smile. She thought he returned it, but maybe his cheek was just itchy. Luckily, Yuki knew the shape and weight of Odile’s ego. Odile found it tiresome to think critically about topics unrelated to herself.

  Lillian made soup from the can for dinner. She emptied dried basil and rosemary into the pot, as if this scattering would make it home-made.

  Odile had pulled a brown valise into the center of the room. Next to it, she arranged seven Polaroids.

  “What’re you doing?” Yuki asked.

  “Packing,” Odile replied

  “Packing?”

  “For Europe.”

  “You’re going to Europe?”

  “That’s what I said. For development.”

  “Development of what?”

  “Of me. I’m taking the hairdryer.”

  “No you’re not,” Lillian shouted from the kitchenette. She emerged balancing three bowls of soup. “You know, I modeled once.”

  “Yeah, yeah. But you gave it all up for me. Could you be more of a cliché?” Odile replied.

  “I gave it up for my ART. Something you’ve never understood my dear.” Lillian slapped the base of the salt-shaker, once, twice, but nothing came out. “Anyway, do try to take in the Colosseum. If you don’t, people will always ask you if you did.”

  Odile didn’t bother sitting down. She shuttled between the two rooms, trading garments between suitcase and bedroom.

  Yuki spooned her soup. She would drink it. Her digestive system would leech the sugars and nutrients. Her liver and kidneys would absorb the poisons. The water would be pissed into the toilet bowl and washed away. Yet all her conscious mind had to do was bring the steel spoon to the liquid and lift it a few inches to her mouth. It seemed sinister. What else was her body doing without her knowledge? What would it make her do next, and when? Was it sending out secret scent signals to Lou? The more she concentrated on the soup, the less she was able to taste it. All of this was better than thinking about Odile leaving. It was better than remembering the bus ride home after the Whitney. He had never spoken to her about it, but he must remember what an idiot she’d been. The joy had bubbled away to leave her shame behind. She had tried to explain how the dirt had made her feel, how she needed to be an artist. He had offered to buy her a Coke. He had patted her on the head like the absurd child she was. She should just go back to school, that was where children belonged.

  Odile came back with the olive dress. “Now you’re sure this doesn’t make me look too sallow?”

  It was two days to Christmas. The office had emptied out. The news continued because, in Lou’s words, “Baby Jesus isn’t going to stop people dying, fucking, and killing.”

  The phone rang. She lifted it, pressing her weight into the receiver.

  “Yuki, Yuki is that you?” The voice was female, assertive in a way that suggested the speaker had glasses, probably ones with thick tortoiseshell rims.

  “Yes, to whom am I speaking?”

  “It’s Maude.”

  Maude’s tortoiseshells were dyed purple. The editor-in-chief’s secretary was half secretary, half mother. Everyone knew she brought in casseroles for the editor’s lunch, and scolded him for staying up late.

  “He wants to know.”

  “He wants to know what?”

  “The job, are you keeping it?”

  “No. But please tell him thank you very much.”

  Maude hung up. Soon Yuki would be back at school. She’d overhear girls talking about their new sweaters, the cousins they saw, the birds they ate. She’d be spared the humiliation of explaining her own vacation because no one would ask.

  Flocks of jagged-edged scribbles flew from her pen onto the yellow legal pad she kept obscured on her lap.

  She went to lunch but didn’t eat. She walked past shop windows. These days she had enough money to buy new clothes. But she knew believing that clothes would change anything was naive. NYU girls swung past, their hair shimmering just above the flat behinds they’d slipped into denim flares. The college student population was sparser now, but a few refused to return to Arkansas, or wherever it was mustard-haired girls grew.

  Yuki tried to picture herself as a college girl. It seemed like stepping backward. She had a pay stub and skirt suits. People called her Ms. Oyama.

  Two girls sat in a window booth. They were splitting a Coca-Cola. Their lipstick mingled on the white straw. Yuki stood pretending to examine the menu pasted to the window. They looked so easy with one another. Yuki missed Odile, which was stupid, because they slept in the same bed. But Odile no longer invited Yuki to the set or anywhere else.

  When she returned from lunch, there was no one waiting. Even the boil of the main office had simmered down. There was no one to see her bite her lip when she saw the flowerpot. It crouched right in the center of her desk behind her nameplate. The ceramic planter was filled to the brim with dirt but there was no plant, not even a dead stalk to say something had once been there. The sides of the pot were clean. The soil was dry. Dappled gray pebbles nestled in the dirt. She wrapped her hands around the terracotta. The lobby was empty. She lifted the pot and pressed her nose against the dry upper skin of the earth. It smelled of playgro
unds, of the flowers pressed inside her father’s dictionary, of skinning her knees and jumping back up.

  A note was taped to the base.

  Happy Holidays. They didn’t sell these in the museum shop but . . .

  L

  He’d remembered the museum! She’d bought Odile a pocket mirror, Lillian a box of Turkish delight, and Lou nothing. Baby Jesus might have been unable to prevent murder, but he had pretty much brought sports reporting to a halt. So Lou was spending his days with Lillian. As far as she knew, he wasn’t clocking into the office. But he must be here now.

  She made three cups of coffee. Three, so Lou would know he was not particularly special. Any journalist who came in could take one.

  Was this love? She felt no wheezy Whitney panic. She just wanted to wrap her hands around the pot, carry it down the street, and show it to a friend. She wanted to hold the note up as evidence and say, Look. Look, he thought about me. He thought about me carefully. He thought I was special.

  A terracotta-colored glow settled over her. One of the secretaries swished by, and said without pausing, “Your geranium die?” Yuki wanted to snap that if she had grown a plant it would have been nothing as ignominious as a geranium, but the woman had swept a newspaper off the table and left. Yuki said to the empty room, “I would plant orchids and cherry trees.”

  Yuki supposed she could tell Odile. They’d been best friends. But it isn’t difficult to come first in a race of one. Best did not mean good. She’d be sleeping off her spiked eggnog. And what would Yuki say? I have a crush on your mother’s lover? The feeling rests in my stomach like the only meal I’ve eaten all year? Anyway, Odile was leaving. And what would Yuki do living alone with Lillian, and seeing Lou? That is if the present meant what she thought it might maybe mean.

  Yuki didn’t call. She ran past the copy desks, the break room, any number of secretaries, slowing as she reached Maude’s line of vision. Maude was eating her casserole at her desk. She had a folded cloth napkin on her lap. It was pristine.

  “Did you tell him already?”

  “Tell him what?”

  “That I was going back to school?”