Silver Girl

by Leslie Pietrzyk

  “But you,” she said, “I trust you.” That same surge of joy, as she stood up and cupped my chin with one hand, tilting my head so I looked up at her and the tiny creases in her makeup, like cracks in an old oil painting. “You understand what sadness is. You know. We both do.”

  My eyes prickled with sudden tears. I couldn’t help it. She held my face steady so I couldn’t shake away those tears. Her eyes, too—but she kept herself still in that miraculous way she had, until one tear dropped free, gliding down the curve of her cheek, and she let go of me and sat down, straight as before. She dabbed her face with a tissue from her purse and announced it was supposed to rain tomorrow afternoon.

  There was chitchat—with the boxes still stacked on the table—and then she told me she couldn’t wait for Jess, though she needed to see her because of this whole Tylenol scare, that she needed to see both of us, that my parents must be so worried, that it was a scary, insane world where people do the things they do. “Just scary,” she said, “and just insane that we’re not safe in our own home.” She repeated “our own home” a thousand more times. Maybe it only felt like it.

  She scribbled a note to Jess, left. I wrote my paper. I don’t remember what it was about. Maybe Jane Eyre. Maybe Thomas Hardy. It seemed I was always reading Thomas Hardy in my classes. Jess came home just as my paper-writing vision was kicking in; she was looped from meeting a guy from her Theories of Persuasion class for drinks at the Orrington Hotel bar because she wanted copies of old midterms from his frat’s test file. “Bleah,” she said, “he’s got the fattest face in the world, like the rump of a blimp,” with a huge sigh to remind us that her ex-fiancé’s face was flawless. She said she’d deal with her mom’s note in the morning, that her mom was crazy, that everyone was crazy, that she hated men. She didn’t notice the rubber-banded boxes on the coffee table.

  At about five A.M., with my paper wrapped up, I collected the boxes, carrying them into my bedroom, and set them on the hand-me-down dresser where the nail polish was, where my sister’s pictures used to be. It seemed disrespectful that the nail polish was nearby, so I dumped the bottles into a drawer. I didn’t like half the colors anyway, shades Jess had tired of. The boxes were tidy, a neat stack, even rows: a wall. I liked that they contained sadness. I liked that the sadness was not exactly mine, and that rubber bands safely held the boxes shut, and that really, if I did open one of the boxes, I would see only meaningless rocks. I liked that Jess’s mom had given them to me and not to Jess.

  I pulled my sister’s pictures out of the drawer and propped them up behind the boxes, arranging them tallest to shortest.

  As I collapsed into bed, my temples bulged with an abrupt headache, and all I could think of was that Tylenol powder still on the table. It could be poison, which was crazy, crazy. The darkness felt like a thing knotted around me, until finally I was asleep, and the next morning it was so simple to wipe away that white powder with a damp paper towel and take my typed paper off to class.

  Strategies for Survival #4: Lists

  (winter, freshman year)

  Jess and I kept lists. I started her on that, which sometimes she would out of the blue thank me for, like it was a big thing. It was something. Not a big thing, but something. There was a book I obsessed over when I was younger, The Book of Lists. Everything was in there, like lists of favorite sexual positions and lists of kings with syphilis. The book had been banned from our school library, so I read it in the reference section of the public library, sitting off in the corner by the overgrown spider plants, feeling immoral and dirty, but relieved to have a specific reason to feel that way, flipping the pages for an hour (how long you were allowed to keep a reference book). I loved the library but hated its endless rules. So I made my own book of lists that I shoved under the mattress, one of those bound composition books with the mottled black-and-white covers that I filled with lists: Animals I Sort of Look Like; Middle Names That Are Better Than Mine; Favorite Foods to Eat When I’m Sick. My lists weren’t ambitious, never offering plans or goals for the future. They merely reported the facts of the moment, which is what I thought lists did: report information. State what was, not what might be.

  Jess and I started keeping lists around early December of our freshman year, when winter bit down. We were at Osco because Jess had spilled her eye makeup remover and needed more, and I had to escape my psychology textbook because I was self-diagnosing manic depression. As we roamed the overheated aisles, we landed in school supplies in front of a stack of those composition books, and I gasped the tiniest bit in surprise, because that time in my other life felt distant and far removed, so other—as if I were a snake spotting a dried, shed skin tangled in the branches of a brush, startled it used to be mine.

  Jess was especially observant of tiny things: “What’s the matter?” she asked. She unzipped her parka, finally, and pushed back the fur-edged hood; I had started sweating the moment we walked into the store and draped my coat awkwardly over one arm. I looked like a shoplifter, but so many old people shopped here they kept the thermostat at eighty.

  “These notebooks,” I said, letting my hand rest on the top of the stack. In Iowa, Drug Fair offered them two for a dollar on sale, which was when I stocked up. There was a white square on the front with lines for your name and the subject, which I left blank, not wanting to muck up the smooth sheen of the cover; my handwriting was pedestrian, readable but ugly, and I often studied handwriting, hoping to find something pretty to incorporate into my own: a crosshatch through a Z, a tilted dash instead of a dot over a lowercase i, almost like an accent mark.

  Jess lifted the top notebook from the stack, slipping it out from under my hand. “I’m buying this,” she said. “Want one?”

  I shook my head no (she didn’t need to know I had only a quarter in my pocket), but she grabbed another and dropped both into her basket. She was already buying me a black L’Oréal eyeliner pencil and a pair of Hanes ultra-sheer hose in nude. She said the hose I wore made my legs look fake, like plastic. I would always end up with something new whenever I went to Osco with her. But I had to be there or else she wouldn’t bring anything back. As if anything not in her line of sight didn’t exist.

  It seemed daring to admit this to her: “I wrote up lists in these notebooks. When I was a kid.”

  Jess got it right away: “Records to Take to a Desert Island. Favorite Picture Books. Cities to Visit Before I Die. Best Mixers for Bourbon. Worst Hangovers. Most Idiotic Dates.”

  “Like that,” I said.

  “Like a diary, but quicker,” she said. Her eyes locked on to me, into me, like I had breathed a secret out and she had breathed it right in.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I want to go back and start one,” she said. That’s how she was, deciding something that fast and doing it that fast, and so we were done trolling the aisles of Osco.

  In her dorm room, we boiled water in a hotpot—tea for her, a mix of instant coffee and powdered hot chocolate for me that Jess called disgusting—and the room took on that steamy early-winter quality of dimming late-afternoon light that is only Chicago: a white-gray sky pressing low outside, leaning flat against the cold window pane; the small circle of yellow lamplight never all the way reaching wherever I sat; a crushing loneliness seeping inward, edging closer and closer, as rhythmic and persistent as breathing; old snow and crusted slush rimming the salt-stained pavement outside. The first Edward Hopper painting I saw I understood immediately because of these Chicago winter afternoons, and the first time I heard Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. There should be coziness to these moments of winter, relief at being inside and warm as darkness settled in, but through all my years in Chicago, I never felt cozy or relieved during those wintery twilights, only anxious as I waited for fully night, or fully spring.

  I sat at her desk, and she sat crosswise on her unmade bed, the puffy down comforter scrunched at one end like something discarded, a crumpled Kleenex. The books on her desk were also askew, and I longed to
restack them: either largest to smallest in a pyramid, or with the bindings all matched straight and even, or with the bottoms aligned. But I stared at the blank page of my composition book, at the blue Flair pen in my hand, at the evenly spaced lines across the white paper.

  “Let’s do our ideal man,” she said. “Our future husband.” She wrote for a minute, and I listened to her pen scratch. Abruptly she said, “Should these be in order?”

  “Do what you want,” I said, but obviously priorities were crucial. The idea was to hone and make judgments. This is better than that: Anne with an e is a better middle name than Ann without. It’s slightly better to look like a tiger than to look like a lion. Without order, what you wrote was no better than a random grocery list. “I number mine,” I said.

  She tapped her pen on the page. “So rigid with your rules. How can you be like that?” she asked.

  “How can you not?” I joked back, not joking.

  I watched the top of her pen bob across the paper. Without looking up, without pausing, she said, “I’m just writing everything down. Who cares about the order?”

  Who did care about the order? Who cared that the most favorite food to eat when you’re sick was chicken and stars soup and the second most favorite was orange Jell-O? Who cared about any of it, long lists in a composition book, a kid sitting at a wooden table in the dark corner of the library memorizing the list of most active volcanoes? Again, I dared to admit something: “Number it at the end, when you’re done. That’s what I do.”

  “You mean write everything down first?”

  “Fill in the numbers last,” I said. “That’s the best part. Deciding what’s first.”

  “I’ll try,” she said. “But it’s notably insane. Clearly you have a disturbed mind. Clearly you’re crazy.”

  “Clearly,” I agreed.

  My lists had always been extremely private. But Jess expected us to read these out loud and debate the order of the items. “I’ve got dark eyes before dark hair,” she said. “Aren’t eyes more important than hair?”

  “You say that until he goes bald,” I warned.

  She laughed. “Sense of humor is first, always. God knows I need someone who makes me laugh.”

  I was maybe tired of hearing about her list. She’d been going over it for twenty minutes, the minutiae of this imaginary man, a man who never wore sandals, whose chest hair wasn’t gross but whose chest wasn’t baby-butt smooth either; how he could be smarter than her about some things but she had to be smarter than him about other things; how he had to know all the different wrenches and which to use when; who ate Ruffles not regular potato chips, though I’d barely seen Jess eat potato chips, and pepperoni on pizza or maybe sausage but never green peppers; who thought Abraham Lincoln was the most heroic of the presidents; who wouldn’t complain about going to the theater the way her father did, and the same with art museums, though also I’d never seen Jess go to an art museum.

  I had a list I could trot out for her, but the truth was I didn’t want to be married. Nor did I want children. I couldn’t even want a house with a white picket fence. These seemed like odd, shameful secrets, so I kept them to myself. But while I couldn’t want what everyone else wanted, I was always aware of that treacherous ache of wanting, that dark hunger. To avoid reading my list, I kept asking about hers.

  Finally the afternoon shifted into night, and it was only ordinary darkness outside the window, and what we saw when we looked over were our own startled reflections. The dorm cafeteria was open for dinner, and I would go, and this list would be over. I could have stood up and said I was going to dinner, let Jess claim she’d see me later, knowing she wouldn’t, knowing she either skipped dinner or ran in last minute to grab carrot sticks off the salad bar, a spoonful of sunflower seeds wrapped up in a napkin.

  Instead I said, “What about money? You didn’t write down that he had to be rich.”

  She tucked her pen behind her ear, which was an affectation she took up for a short while, and pushed aside her composition book. “That’s not on my list,” she said.

  I let a silence grow, imagining it the way a wave built, built, then crashed into a cascade of foam.

  She said, “Is that on your list?”

  I looked down at my paper, pretended to read what I had written. Then I said, “Second.”

  “That’s the most important?” she shrieked.

  “Second most important,” I said. “Number two.”

  “What’s first?” she asked.

  “He needs to be very smart,” I said. “Maybe the smartest person I’ve met.”

  “Hmm...” She studied her list, did not meet my eyes. I knew she wasn’t reading her words on the page. “Money shouldn’t matter.” Her voice was prim, starched.

  “But doesn’t it?” I said.

  She shook her head. “I could love a man who was poor. You too. You’re not shallow.”

  “But this is the ideal husband,” I said. “Wouldn’t the ideal husband be stinking rich? The ideal?”

  “I’m not writing it down.” She sounded angry, at herself, not at me, or maybe at me. I was almost happy to provoke her. People across the country had been laid off. People couldn’t find jobs. I didn’t have enough money in my pocket to buy this notebook at Osco. Didn’t she know any of that? She capped her pen, drummed it rapidly on top of the notebook. This is how hard it is to tell the truth, was my casual thought.

  “No one has to know,” I said. “Like a diary. What’s the point if you’re not totally honest?”

  “You’ll know,” she said. “You know now.”

  “I’ll forget,” I said. “Anyway, I’m the one who said it first.”

  “You did.” She opened her notebook, wrote something quickly, then said, “Okay, Miss Honest Abe, now it’s second. After ‘He makes me laugh.’ A funny rich guy.”

  “And a smart rich guy,” I said. “Maybe they’ll be twin brothers. With dark hair and dark eyes.”

  She laughed and tossed the notebook across her bed, into the folds of the crumpled comforter. I wondered if she would write another word in it, or if this was only a diversion for this wintery afternoon when no one wanted to study. But it turned out that she liked lists. Sometimes she read them out loud. Otherwise I caught the composition book somewhere—on a desk, tucked in her backpack, alongside a sociology textbook in a bookshelf.

  As for me, I wrote some lists to make her happy—silly things like Grossest Food in the Cafeteria, and Zittiest Boys in Astronomy Class, and Dead Poets Who Probably Were Good Kissers. I read my lists to Jess and she laughed at the right places, even when she hadn’t seen the zitty boys herself or never heard of Rimbaud. Those were my lists in those days. There were other lists in my head, but I didn’t share those with Jess or anyone, or ever dare write them down.

  WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR CHRISTMAS, LITTLE GIRL?

  (winter, before college)

  It’s hard to think back.

  I took Grace to the mall to see Santa. My mother wasn’t wasting money on a stamp for Grace’s letter. “He’s at the mall,” my mother said. “It will be fun for you to tell him yourself what you want.” The cue was for Grace to agree, so she did. The letter was cute, with drawings of ice skates and some doll she’d seen on Saturday morning cartoons. A silver baton. Special artist crayons. Books. She was about eight then, and I was a high school senior. But when we got to the mall, she abruptly refused to approach Santa, to nestle in his lap. No reason, just, “I don’t feel like it,” and we lingered outside the white picket fence bordering the fake winter wonderland snow and mirrors playing iced-over ponds. Plastic reindeer. Snowmen. Fake Christmas trees. Boxes wrapped up like gifts with sparkly bows as big as cabbages. Santa slouched in an oversized red-and-green sleigh, and the idea was to sit with him while a guy dressed like an elf took a picture. It was all very jolly—I mean, to an eight-year-old.

  This Santa didn’t look substantially better or worse than others, but as we watched for twenty minutes or so, plenty of kids cried
and clung to their mother’s arms; plenty of kids, not just Grace, took one look at the billows of that fake beard, the shiny black boots, and that gelatinous mountain of red velvet and heard the robotic “ho-ho-ho,” and their minds clicked like Grace’s: Nuh-uh, nope, not even for a free candy cane. The moms wrestled or bribed their kids up there anyway, and most ended up smiling and hugging Santa as the elf snapped the picture. “You sure?” I asked Grace a couple of times, and she shook her head. Not even for a baton and ice skates, which she wouldn’t get anyway—or maybe the baton, since that was only a buck. “I don’t have to have those things,” she said.

  As kids paraded onto Santa’s sleigh, cozying into his lap for their private chat, I wondered if Grace still believed in Santa. Kids at school had to be speculating. She’d made that list, but even I made lists after I knew better, hedging my bets. My mother thought she’d be the one bringing her today, but she got called into work last minute, so I volunteered. My mother would not have been one to lurk outside the wonderland, watching everyone else’s kids chatter at Santa. I imagined her seizing Grace by the wrist, marching her up the candy-cane-striped carpeted pathway, and, with a sneaky push toward the steps to the sleigh, barking, “Tell him what you want.” I imagined Grace letting Santa’s arms compress her into a furry hug, Grace unable to remember a word of her list. Before she left, my mother said, “Take care of her,” as if she were doing the favor, not me, when I already took Grace plenty of places and heated up her dinner and washed her hair lots of nights. Then my mother handed over a fistful of coins that she snuck from my father’s penny jar. “Buy her that pretty candy at the fancy card store,” she said. Like I’d dump pennies onto the glass countertop at Kirlin’s, with its carpeted hush and elegant glass cases arranged with rows of wafery pastel creams and jelly fruit slices and bins of pink and black licorice bridge mix and colorful Jordan almonds. Nuh-uh, nope, not even for glittery crystals of rock candy on sticks, not for that or for anything would I accept a handful of my father’s pennies. So I had bus fare (which exceeded the price of a stamp, I noted privately) and not more.