“This is Jess’s room,” she said.
I nodded, pushed the door all the way open. Anyone else would have skulked out, embarrassed to be caught. Penny remained standing, one hand on the chairback, her leg bent so her foot was propped up against the inside of her knee like a stork, an uncomfortable pose to hold, but she seemed unbothered. She wore an oversized R2-D2 T-shirt with holes at both shoulder seams and white tube socks with red stripes bunched around her ankles. Her hair was lumpy, and I wanted to smooth it for her, to wipe off the rest of that lipstick with a damp washcloth and Vaseline.
She pointed at one of the framed photographs on the desk, Jess and her mother posing with cheeks pressed together at the top floor of the Hancock building, a view of tiny Chicago buildings behind their shoulders. I had taken that picture; her mother had invited us to Water Tower Place for lunch and shopping. Jess had bought red flats at Marshall Field’s after trying on a dozen different shoes; on the way back, she said she planned to return them right off the el at the Evanston Field’s, that she bought them only to make her mother happy, that the only thing that made her mother happy was shopping and spending her father’s money as fast as he could make it, which I didn’t know how to respond to. Penny asked, “That’s her mom?”
I nodded.
“She’s pretty,” but the way she said it, I knew she didn’t think so. I guessed her mother was prettier, younger, bolder, less nervous, more independent—all those qualities men want in their girlfriends but that get siphoned out after girlfriends become wives. Then I realized I knew who her mother was because her photograph was on the news last night before we left for the movie; she was the pretty secretary. Bright eyes, high cheekbones, wild blond Stevie Nicks hair, kind of like Penny’s. Thinking back, her left side had been sliced off in the picture, as if someone—Jess’s father?—had been cropped out. This whole other life he had, now crashing into this one. “And who’s he?” Penny asked, pointing to another photograph: Jess and Tommy lying entangled on a blanket at the lakefront, Jess in linen shorts that needed to be ironed before every wearing, cute white tennis shoes, and perky socks. Jess thought her legs looked good in that picture and said that was the reason she kept it on her dresser. I pretended to believe her.
I facedowned the photograph. “We don’t like him anymore,” I said.
“He looks like one of those guys you think you like but who ends up being a big huge jerk,” she said.
“Something like that,” I said.
Penny said, “I liked a super-awful guy last year who told everyone he got to second base with me when he hardly didn’t even barely get to first. Stupid Greg Tomlinson.”
I said, “My advice is stay away from boys until you’re like twenty-five. Even then, they’re always trouble.”
“Is that what you do?” she asked. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “You should go back to bed.” I yawned widely, first fake, hoping she would follow, then for real.
Penny pointed to the composition book. “In her diary she says she wants to marry a rich guy. Is that guy rich?”
“Put that back where you found it,” I said. “You know you shouldn’t read other people’s private things.”
“It’s the only way to find out anything worthwhile when you’re just a kid,” she said. “Right?”
Of course she was right, but I kept my lips pressed in a tight line. I went over and snapped shut the composition book. “Where does this go?” I asked, though I knew: between the mattress and the box spring. My hands shook a tiny bit, I don’t know why, so I folded my arms across my chest, very schoolmarmish.
“Guess what she wrote about you,” Penny said.
“Stop it.” Our eyes met in a staring match that I knew I would win, and I did, and she pointed to the bed: “Under the mattress,” and I slid the notebook between the mattress and the box spring, up near the pillow. I straightened the comforter, pulled tight the sheets. I would know if Jess had written about me, and she hadn’t. At least, not last time I looked.
“She’s worried about you,” Penny said.
“I’m the one letting you stay here,” I said. “Maybe remember that.”
“I just want to know her,” she said. “She’s my sister.”
The iciness of that word, spoken with crystal enunciation. Maybe that was the moment I stopped trusting her, though of course what she said was true. Sister.
She grabbed the cassette off the desk, flipped open the case, which was empty. “We both like Blondie and the Police and U2—Boy. And that ticket stub from the Stones on her bulletin board for the Tattoo You tour? How awesome is that? I was dying to go, but my mom said I was too young even though like all my friends were there.”
“Blondie is mine,” I said. “She borrowed it.” Not really, but I didn’t want Penny thinking she knew it all just because here she was snooping around Jess’s room, reading Jess’s book of lists and slapping on her lipstick.
Penny said, “Every time I fall asleep, I dream about my mom and she’s telling me to go get her the Tylenol. In the dream I say no.” She dropped the stork pose, thunking her foot back on the floor, then tugged at her socks, pulling them as high as they would go. She looked dorky-sweet, like a foreign exchange student on the first day of school. It was hard to know what to think of her, the snoopy sneak and just a little girl all wrapped up together, and I had to remind myself I had decided not to trust her. As if she knew what I was thinking, Penny quickly said, “Did you see the Stones with Jess?” She smiled, suddenly conversational, interested, as if we were cousins passing gravy down the table at family Thanksgiving.
“I don’t remember,” I said.
“Don’t remember!” She shook her head like I had to be insane. “The Rolling Stones! Come on.”
Of course I remembered that I didn’t go. Tommy got great tickets from a scalper, and he asked Jess if she’d mind if he went with a friend instead of her since she didn’t even like the Stones. Then he asked me if I wanted to go. Who would ever know? he said; it was Rosemont Horizon, the place was huge, and... the Stones! My favorite, which I didn’t know he knew. I could tell Jess that I was going with one of the dopes from my poetry workshop, some guy who was trying to impress me with a big-deal date. It was a stupid and dangerous plan—I couldn’t even imagine Tommy in public, me in public alone with Tommy; what we would talk about, whether we would hold hands—but I said yes because that’s how much I wanted to see the Stones, and when I told Jess I was going, in the next breath she told me that probably she should go with Tommy after all. “I’m not leaving room for Sydney Moore to squeeze her fat ass back in,” she said, and I told her she was paranoid and possessive and hyper-jealous and all that—dumping on her so much that she smirked and said, “Why are you so worried?” and I shut up. So I had to dress like I was going to a concert, leave to meet my imaginary guy, who wasn’t picking me up, which was a whole huge lie of an explanation that made Jess lift her eyebrow in scorn. I named him Jake from reading The Sun Also Rises for the first time, and then I rode the way-out-there lines of the el for hours, because I couldn’t think where else to go where absolutely no one I knew would see me. The next day I relived the concert with her, how great it was and how Mick was hot for an old guy and which songs were best, listing them out in her notebook, screwing up when I said “Wild Horses,” which she couldn’t remember them playing, and I said, “I meant, I just like that song.” I remembered all that, and the flares of confused excitement when Tommy first told me he got the tickets for us, my mind flashing first on what to wear and then on his Porsche, but not on Jess. I told myself not to feel those edges of happiness ever again about anything he said to me, because that wasn’t what we were about. It was like the time some guy Magic Markered on my dorm room message board, outside my door, “You make a dead man come,” signing, “Cheerio, Mick Jagger,” in a flourish, and I was proud, pretending to forget to erase it, though I knew I was supposed to be offended.
Penny was wal
king around the room now, rubbing her feet into the black shag throw rug as if she wanted to collect Jess’s static electricity into her body. She fingered the Marimekko bedspread with the primary red flowers, brushing her palm along the needlepoint throw pillows of rabbits and goldfish and irises that Jess’s mother had stitched during a phase when she was heavy into needlepoint. Even I got my own pillow of leaves vining around acorns because there were so many pillows stuffed into closets at Jess’s house; she would have given me a dozen more, but Jess told her to stop, that it was embarrassing. I should have corralled Penny out, herded her back into my room where she could touch all my stuff, which would take about two minutes. And yet I understood. Sometimes I went into Jess’s room when she was gone, just looking at her things, maybe trying to understand why she was who she was and why I was who I was. As if having a Marimekko bedspread—which is what I learned was also on my freshman roommate’s bed—was an explanation. For a while, I was saving money, planning to buy one for myself, but when I thought it through, I understood that even if I had the comforter, I wouldn’t have the Lanz of Salzburg flannel nightgown for frigid nights, and if I had the nightgown I wouldn’t have the Top-Siders, and if I had the Top-Siders (which, actually, I did have—three dollars at a thrift store), then I would need the Fair Isle sweater in blue, and if I had it in blue, I would need it in pink and cream and heather... that there was no end to wanting and needing and imagining that just one more thing would be the thing, one more sweater, one more kiss, one more boy, one more anything. That endless yearning, that empty hunger, even when I knew it wasn’t sweaters I wanted (though also, actually it was). It was to not care how many sweaters I had; it wasn’t a number, but a word: “enough.” And that word was impossible, it seemed to me.
Even so: the ritual of looking at Jess’s room was like studying a place of completion, standing in the doorway to stare through a daydreamy haze, not necessarily registering each item specifically, but admiring the tableau, like the picture of a jigsaw puzzle on a card table: not one piece missing. So pleasant, the way it was pleasant to be alone in a room in a museum, surrounded by walls of important paintings, each more perfect than the last, and then another room, and another. And then, here, the same topsy-turvy moment when it turned oppressive, and I was overwhelmed by this airless perfection, and I’d jam my eyes shut to break the spell, and once I was free, I’d tiptoe in and rearrange some small thing: slide a folder from the top of the stack to the bottom or dog-ear a random page in a book. I don’t know why this was satisfying. Jess never noticed. But now and then, I thought something felt askew in my own room, and I wondered if she did the same thing when I was out, though I knew she didn’t; it was just me hoping she had.
It occurred to me that Penny and I were not very different. Except that she was Jess’s sister, and I was Jess’s friend. But we were both in a precarious spot.
Penny was studying a framed poster of Houses of Parliament that had also hung on Jess’s wall freshman year and last year. She touched the glass, circling her thumb around the image, then pushing down hard, purposely leaving an “I was here” print. She shot me a defiant look, as if she expected me to stop her.
“That’s a print from a painting by Claude Monet,” I said. “The original is downtown, in the Art Institute.”
“That building with the lions outside,” she said. “We went in school. The teachers kept screaming, ‘Don’t touch.’ I wanted to, though. You know when someone tells you not to, how that makes you want to do it even more?”
“It’s just a print,” I said. “No one cares if you touch it.” I stepped up to the poster and I don’t know why, but I pressed my hand flat on the glass, overlaying Penny’s thumbprint. Also leaving a definite mark. The glass was cool under my touch. She set her hand next to mine. “Anyone can buy this at the museum gift shop,” I said. “Probably like ten bucks or so, without the frame.” Even I could buy this, I thought, or something better; everyone loved Monet so much that I considered him a cliché. All the girls in the dorm taped Claude Monet posters onto their cinder block walls; I had noticed that even before I knew who Claude Monet was.
“I thought art was so special,” she said.
“It is,” I said. “This is a copy they make for normal people to hang in their house. The real one would cost millions of dollars.”
“I thought anything framed was real art,” she said. She didn’t seem embarrassed to say so the way I would have been. Jess had laughed at me for saying Mo-nette instead of Mo-nay, for asking if the Houses of Parliament were in New York. After that, I was more careful.
“I touched a painting,” I said. “In the museum. I put my hand right on it, right in front of everyone. People around me gasped. Then I got kicked out. But I had to see what it felt like.” I felt shy admitting this, I don’t know why, and I didn’t even know why I was telling her. I knew the no touching rule, but there were so many paintings, and they were so... I couldn’t say what they were. Only that there were so many. That had been the first time I went to an art museum, the first time I saw art that was real.
Penny plopped onto the bed, bounced a little, brought her wrist up to her nose and inhaled her scent—rather, Jess’s scent. Then she stared up at the ceiling, moved her lips as if counting.
There was an uncomfortable silence. So I sat in Jess’s desk chair and sorted the makeup, returning it to the drawer with the plastic divider tray, eye shadows here, lipsticks there. A soothing little task. When I got to the Raspberry Glacé, still open, I sniffed its waxiness, glanced in the mirror at Penny behind me, who tilted her head to watch. So I rolled and capped it and dropped it in the drawer—the last piece of the mess on the desk.
“I should go back to that museum sometime,” Penny said. “It’s probably better without teachers yelling. Maybe Jess will take me. I want her to like me so bad.”
Our eyes met and locked in the mirror. Only a kid would dare express such naked want. She was a kid. Why did I need to keep reminding myself? I was supposed to say something comforting like “She will,” but instead I asked, “Did he—did your father talk about her a lot?”
“I only found out this summer,” Penny said, “when I heard him telling my mom about Linda being dead in the car crash. My mom was so mad, yelling that he was never supposed to say that name in her apartment, and so right then he got all mad and started screaming, ‘Linda, Linda,’ just like that, and my mom kicked him out and cried the whole weekend and barfed from drinking the whole bottle of my dad’s special Scotch. It was all super horrible, and then I went to the library and found Linda’s picture from the newspaper article and it mentioned Jess and Jess’s mother and this whole other family besides me and my mom. I thought Linda was just some kid from being married before. I got all sick to my stomach like I was going to barf in the library, so I snuck the newspaper into the bathroom and ripped out the article and brought it home to show my mom. She was like, ‘Get that away from me, I never want to see that picture again,’ and I couldn’t believe she never told me about any of them—because she knew already, she knew everything—and I said, ‘My sister who no one ever told me I had is dead,’ and she said, ‘Those people aren’t your sisters and never will be,’ and she said it just like that, ‘those people.’” Penny flung herself backward on the bed, staring up at the ceiling.
“Wow,” I said.
“I begged to go to Linda’s funeral, but she said no and so did he,” she said. “He was mad that I found out, and my mom was mad at him and me. I was grounded for a week, with no TV. Everyone was mad at everyone. I was that way of being mad where you don’t think you can stand another minute, you know? I kept dreaming about Linda, like she was in the room with me, like a ghost, but she never said anything. She just stared at me from her bloody face.”
She twisted her fingers nervously. I sat perfectly still. I knew there was more. I knew she wanted to tell me. I even knew what she was going to say.
Penny continued: “I was so mad at my mom, the maddest I’ve
ever been in my whole entire life, for never telling me any of that. Not even one word. I think I was still kind of mad when she died.” She gave a little cough, sort of a choking sound, as if trying not to cry. “I was the one who gave her the pills. Me.”
“It was an accident,” I said. “A crazy, random, horrible thing.”
“Is it?” she said. “Even if maybe . . . maybe I was so mad that I secretly wanted her to die?”
“No, you didn’t,” I said. “No one’s really that mad for real. Even if they think they are.”
“I don’t know,” she said. After a moment, she added, “Have you ever been that mad?”
Me walking into the living room and there’d be my father, snoring in front of a baseball game on TV, and part of my brain would turn automatic: Get a pillow from your bed, hold it down, you could do that, five or ten minutes,” and then I’d walk upstairs and close the door and lean up against it until my heart slowed to normal.
“No,” I said. “Never.”
Another pause.
I said, “You had no idea about your dad?”
She swung her head wildly, her hair flailing no.
I said, “Well, that’s how Jess is right now. She had no idea. This won’t be easy.”
“But I’m her sister,” she said.
“Half sister,” I corrected.
“Isn’t that still family? Doesn’t that count?” She sighed.
“Your dad will be here soon,” I said. “You really should try to get some more sleep. And talk to him about all this.”
“Think he’ll actually show up?” she asked. “Half the time he doesn’t, or he’s late.”
“He said he would.”
She sat up, tugged again on her socks, first up, then down, unable to settle. “After they didn’t let me go to Linda’s funeral, I cracked his car windshield with the hammer out of our junk drawer. He doesn’t know it was me.”
“You shouldn’t have done that,” I said, giving the expected response because I was supposed to be an adult. Secretly, I thought it was the sort of thing I would want to do and, actually, probably was what Jess would do, not that I was going to say so. I moved over and sat on the bed next to her. “Or if you really can’t sleep, I think there’s cereal. Special K.”
Silver Girl Page 16
