“Hunt-uh, Hunt-uh.” Tanya sat down on the bed and folded her arms across the blanket she held. She shook her head no several times. “I ain’t goin’ into town. They’ll find me there.”
“No one’s looking for you anymore,” I told her, deeply annoyed. “No one cares.” This pissed her off.
“Naw, naw, naw.” She shook her head no several more times. “I know better than that. They got radar satellites. They got infrared face recognition technology. Ain’t you read the news? Huh!?” she shouted. She’d been getting more irritable and raising her voice at us for no apparent reason over the last few weeks. It was like dealing with a small child.
“But we’ll go tonight. It’s dark,” I tried. “No one will see you.”
“Oh yeah? And then what?” she snapped back. “How am I gonna live in town? How will I get to the truck stop to make my money? How will you come and see me? People’ll see y’all going in and out. Then they’ll know.”
I hadn’t thought about all of this. She had some good points, but it didn’t matter. “It’s too cold to stay here,” I squealed. “There’s going to be a blizzard next week. You’ve got to go.”
“I don’t got to do nothing.” She tossed the blanket aside and stood, collecting her bag and taking it over to the ledge below the stained-glass Virgin Mary, where she proceeded to lay out her small mirror, onto which she dabbed her powder, which she snorted through a cut-up straw.
“We thought you’d be happy,” Beth said, worry and confusion apparent in her expression.
“I appreciate what you girls tryin’a do for me,” Tanya said, turning and sniffing, then taking her cigarettes out of her pocket and lighting one. She offered me one. I lit it and smoked it, cringing at the horrible menthol taste I never got used to. “But I ain’t goin’ into town tonight. No way. Maybe when it gets colder, if I have to. Or maybe, I’ll just hitch a ride with one of those old boys out to California. Go rest my head in San Francisco. Hang out with some hippies for a while.”
“You can’t stay here anymore,” I persisted. “I’m wearing a winter coat and it’s freezing in here.”
“It ain’t that bad,” Tanya argued. Beth came and sat down next to me dejectedly. I smoked my cigarette hard. I repeated that there was a blizzard coming soon. Beth seconded my concern. We went back and forth for a good twenty minutes, but finally we came to an agreement. We would move her on Sunday. For some reason, she thought, this would be a day when no one would be out and about to see us. I had a horrible feeling that come Sunday she would back down on her promise, but it was something, so I held onto the idea that on Sunday we’d move her, and everything would be all right, whatever all right looked like with her.
“So anyway,” Tanya told us, “I said to him, ‘What’s the difference between a bitch and a bulldog in heat?’ and he said, ‘What?’ And I said ‘tampons,’ you get it? And he looked like he was gonna turn red. And I said, ‘Don’t worry, hon, I don’t bite . . . much.’ And he laughed and laughed. They was always telling jokes like that when I was a little kid. When I was your age, there wasn’t no one watching us like they watch kids now. We could do whatever and didn’t have to worry about creeps like kids do now. I think it’s ’cause of the video games, you know? People growing up like that . . .”
Her stories trailed on into the evening. I took a shot of whiskey and watched the clock till it was time to head home. It didn’t feel the same that night as it had before. It felt like something we were quietly enduring or doing out of obligation and, somehow, on a, I suppose it would be, spiritual level, it made sense to me that the blizzard came early. Something had to change, had to move, had to freeze.
It was the very next day, a Friday, and just after lunch, we were alerted that school would be let out early. The storm was coming fast, more than three days before it was expected. I tried to sneak away when they let us out, but my dad was there waiting for me in the parking lot. The whole town was shutting down, preparing for the big blizzard. Factories were letting the workers out early, and the stores were closing. I asked my dad if I could bike home, but he was insistent, and tossed my bike in his truck bed, telling me we had to go get groceries before the store closed, because we might be snowed in for a couple of days. I saw Beth across the parking lot, getting into her mother’s car, her eyes met mine for a moment, and they were wide with worry. She shook her head no at me before her mom pulled away.
All the way to the grocery store, I begged to go to Beth’s house for the night. “You’re not going anywhere. You could be stuck there for days.” He was annoyed and emphatic. “Absolutely not.” He seldom put his foot down with me, but when he did, I knew it was no use arguing.
I called Beth as soon as I got home and she was inconsolable. She kept quietly weeping. I could almost see her wiping her tears away as she repeated, “What are we going to do, Gillian? We have to do something.”
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “She’ll be okay. She’s tough.” But something in me knew that probably wasn’t true. She was high and drunk and tweaked out most of the time, and the stone walls were more cold than she might even realize. Would she strip naked and run screaming through the onslaught? Would she drink herself into a warm slumber, her body insulated by a whiskey buzz inside a nest of blankets and confusion? I could hope. I could only hope.
The blizzard began just after eight. I watched the snow come down while my father sat on the couch, half watching television and half telling me about his day. I watched the snow come down, at first begging it to be light, then, as the wind began to pick up, I watched the blizzard like it was a murderer descending around us. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. I wanted to tell my father, but I couldn’t. This existed far from him. This existed far outside of any world I could think of as real, with laws and reason. The wind was horribly loud, hissing like a cold kettle and etching frost on the windows. The snow was phantom white, its edges sometimes blue in the streetlights, falling in morbid sheets; like those laid across faces, covering blank eyes, or pulled down for shock.
After the first hour, sleet came with the snow and rattled against the roof, and the wind shook the house where I sat, warm and safe with my father and some fake reality show going on and on, and the temperature outside steadily dropping like a regrettable stone dropped down some dark, long-forgotten well, so deep you don’t hear it touch bottom and it makes you frightened of what it would be like if your own body was that stone, falling down that well of endless coldness, alone in the night.
The storm kept on through the night, and my dad told me to go to bed, but when he finally paid full attention to me, he could see that my face was pale and my eyes crazed with worry and I was trembling all over. He put his arm around me and told me not to be scared of the storm, and I finally burst out crying, and he held me, but I couldn’t stop. I was hiccuping and snorting like a baby, so he took me, for the first time since I was a baby, to bed with him, and fell asleep next to me in his work clothes, my head resting on his shoulder, while I looked out the window through tear-drenched eyes at the unrelenting night sky.
She was like our pet, and like with the pets of children, we couldn’t bear to look. We trudged through the several feet of snow, packed tight in the snowsuits our parents had dressed us in before they allowed us to brave the cold only two days after the blizzard had subsided enough that the roads were passable, and it was possible to drop me off at Beth’s house. We walked silently in our rubber snow boots up the road that led to the cemetery, then through the thick snow that covered the graveyard. The northmost side of the mausoleum had a snowdrift the wind had carved against it nearly five feet high. The door was cracked open, just a half inch, barely noticeable, but enough that I could tell the elements had gotten inside, and my breath also froze in the air. I placed my hand on the door and looked at my feet. I couldn’t bring myself to open it. “Tanya,” I said meekly. “Are you in there? Are you okay?” I closed my eyes and pressed my ear to the door’s small opening, waiting for an answer. There
was none. “Tanya!” Beth cried louder. “It’s us! Hello! Hello!” Beth sounded like a sad little bird. I banged on the door with my gloved fist. It made a deep thudding sound against the door. Tears fell from Beth’s eyes and rolled down her cheeks. They were cold and she wiped them away. “Maybe she hitched a ride to California,” she said sadly. “Maybe she’s at the truck stop.”
I nodded yes. “She probably did. That’s what she said she was going to do.” We stared at the door. We didn’t dare open it. Finally, I pushed it all the way closed and took the heavy chain, which still hung open dangling from the latch, and strung it through the metal hook on the wall, then looped the chain in a knot. I tugged on the door. The chain held tight. “There,” I told Beth. “This way if she does come back, her place will be safe.”
Beth nodded. “That’s nice,” she said. “I hope she does. I’ll miss her.” More tears streamed down her pink cheeks and she wiped them away with her thick mittens. “California is really far away.” I nodded in agreement. It sure was.
We never went back to the cemetery. Of course, when we passed it on our bikes and in our parents’ cars, we couldn’t help but think of her, there in the mausoleum with her crumpled bills and endless cigarettes, our first taste of liquor and of freedom, real freedom we found there where we always used to go, back when the dead left us alone.
TAKE THE WAY
HOME THAT
LEADS BACK TO
SULLIVAN STREET
“Zyprexaolanzapinezydiswithfluoxetinesymbyaxothan.” She pronounced this word with familiar ease. “This drug was recalled from the pharmaceutical market, but I still have a renewable prescription. The doctor said it works best for me, regardless of the side effects.”
Why are smart people always so fucking crazy? Or maybe it’s not that smart people are crazy, it’s just that crazy people present themselves as being super-duper smart. She did. She clung to the notion of her genius like her life depended on it. But you know, if I pull it apart, nothing she ever said was really that smart.
“Geniuses are always considered a little crazy by their generation,” she told me. She told me she had a photographic memory, then she recited the names of the presidents in alphabetical order, then in the order of their presidencies. Then she did the same with the names of philosophers from Aristotle to Žižek.
But that’s not really genius, is it? That’s just memorizing needless shit, which I now know she probably does to keep herself from picking her toenails down till they bleed or shaving all the hair off her entire body for the third time in one day. She told me she can feel it growing.
Kali also told me she has two alternate personalities: a man whose name she doesn’t know, and he is very shy, and a woman named Rose, who is a very horrible person, who slugged her first boyfriend in the face once. But she never remembers anything Rose does.
She said when she becomes these other, more horrible people, it’s like a door closes in front of her and she can sometimes peek though the keyhole and see the blurred images of Rose doing things to people she knows, and she hears the muffled noises from outside, but she can’t quite make out anything clearly, and she certainly can’t control anything they (she) do(es).
She told me she was terrified of worms, and that at night she had dreams that copper worms were eating their way through her skin. That’s why, Kali said, she could never make it through Dune—because of the worms. I said that probably wasn’t the only reason.
Kali told me she could talk to turtles and smell architecture. She tried to make me register Libertarian. She told me she had a feeling about me. The first time we made love, she told me that a blinking red light named Alganon had been visiting her in the night. Alganon blinked to her from the upper corners of the bedroom as a means of communication. Alganon said that I should move in with her.
It’s not like no one told me to stay away from her. Everyone who knew her, and come to think of it, even my friends upon first meeting her, told me I should run as fast as I could in the opposite direction. But Kali knew this would happen. She’d warned me.
“People don’t like me,” she told me. “People think I’m crazy.”
“Are you?”
I guess her eyes were always a little dilated and her mouth was always smiling, especially when she was upset. She was thinner than a skeleton and cold. I don’t know what that feeling was that I had for her. Was it love? Was I just mesmerized? Maybe I wanted to save her from something. Or maybe, most likely, I, like everyone else who let themselves get close to her, believed her insanity was some kind of genius. Her family sure did. They all thought of themselves as geniuses. I guess that’s a big part of why it was so important to her. I guess that’s why her whole identity depended on it.
Jesus. Now I’m picking my nails. My bags are all packed in the backseat. She didn’t hear me leave, I don’t think. It’s three in the morning. I’m just driving around East St. Louis, aimlessly. There’s a line of whores waving at me from the side of the road. They all have really impressive jewelry that glints in my headlights as I pass. I’m just sort of circling this strip. It’s disgusting. There’s like a little minimall of peep shows and porn stores and strip clubs I keep passing, right before or after I get to the whores, depending on my direction. The peep-show mini-mall wouldn’t be so bad, if it weren’t placed directly beside what is obviously a grade school, which shares a playground with the parking lot of the sex strip mall.
I guess I could go live in my dorm. I can’t go there tonight, though. It’s late and my roommate is scared enough of me as it is, even though she’s only met me four times.
I have a dorm at a university in Southern Illinois. It’s part of my package. I haven’t even spent one night in it. I got this college package before I met Kali, when my family was still going to help me pay. They already knew I was a dyke. But when I put a face on it, her face anyway, they stopped helping me pay for anything. Not that they had it to give at all, anyhow. So now I have this stupid dorm I never used that I probably won’t ever be able to pay for, or that I’ll be paying for forever. God. Just crossing the river from St. Louis to Illinois: East St. Louis, what a shithole. And she’s still there, freaking out in our fancy apartment in the West End, the one I lived in but never paid for.
Funny, I’m paying for the crappy dorm I never lived in and not paying for the fancy place I’ve actually been living in for the past year. I should have known, when she asked me to move in with her and I told her I couldn’t afford it because of college and the dorm and all, and she said, “Don’t worry about the rent,” I should have known she needed me too much. Why else would a rich, straight girl overlook the three major facts that (a) I’m a dyke, (b) I’m poor as hell, and (c) I have a small drug problem?
Her parents have lots of money and a fancy house in the city, and she has a fancy apartment in a neighborhood too hip for her. Her mother is a failed actress with stock in Walmart and a permanent glass of red wine attached to her right hand. She’s the spitting image of Shirley MacLaine.
When her mother met me, she asked me if anyone had ever told me that I was also the spitting image of Shirley MacLaine; a young Shirley MacLaine. I said yes, that I had heard that a lot.
She said, “Oh yes, well, women always seek out women like their mothers. Isn’t that what they say? Or is it something else they say?” She asked me this with a resentful grin blooming on her face and a sarcastic lilt in her voice. She’s a little passive-aggressive about her daughter’s newfound lesbianism.
The first time I met her parents, they were hosting a Mensa party in their home. Mensa is a club for people with high IQs. They take a test, pay a due, and then hang around upper-middle-class dinner parties with a bunch of academic liberals who have no social skills. It’s great.
Her mother and father are both members of Mensa. The first time I came to one of their dinner parties, I found fifteen middle-aged frumpies sitting in a circle passing around a helium balloon and reciting dirty limericks in high-pitched voices. Ah
h-ha! I thought. This is why she’s terrified of worms and drinks soap.
When we moved in together, she told me two things. One: she told me there was a headless woman in our kitchen who paced back and forth swinging her own head by its hair (which she always sees in kitchens, but only ever in kitchens), and Two: she told me she didn’t want to take her medication anymore because she didn’t need it. “I probably just needed to come out as a lesbian,” she told me. “Denying that big of a part of yourself can cause serious problems,” she told me.
For a while, I thought maybe she was right. When she stopped taking her medication, at first she seemed better. She didn’t mention the headless woman again. She didn’t vomit in the mornings. She stopped shaving every day. She even started talking to people her own age, making some friends at her college and hanging out in the radio station after classes. For a while there, yeah, when we went out, I enjoyed having fairly normal conversations that didn’t involve detailed global statistics, the sniffing of old buildings, or cryptic discussions of the possible repercussions of her having been named after an ancient god.
Maybe, I thought, the medication was the problem after all. But something did bother me about the fact of her diagnosis. I hadn’t really ever heard anyone complaining that schizophrenia was an overdiagnosed disorder. And there were still moments, even during those peaceful times, I noticed her staring intently at nothing, moving her lips softly, or squeezing her wrist till it bruised. Once, I asked her if she was really feeling more mentally stable, or if she was still seeing and hearing things, but trying to hide it. She snapped out of it, held my hand too hard and explained to me that this (I) was her first real relationship, and she wasn’t going to fuck it up. She wasn’t going to let me get away by being crazy. She didn’t want me to get away at all. She never wanted me to go anywhere actually, and if I did, not without her.
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