Silver Girl

by Leslie Pietrzyk

  “Well.”

  “What if it wasn’t really wrong?” Grace slid her hand out from under mine.

  I had to invent again: “Everything she looked at turned silver. That’s what she did.” I stood and collected up her napkins and chicken bones and honey packets and stuffed them into the chicken box and then balanced the box on top of the overfull trash. I could take it out tomorrow. I had taken it out yesterday or the day before. Seemed like no one took it out but me. I imagined a river of garbage flowing through the kitchen two weeks after I left. I set the Popsicle box on top of the chicken box. Like pick-up sticks, that same care not to screw up with the wrong movement.

  “You’ve got to get to bed,” I said. My voice shouldn’t have sounded so desperate.

  “I’d like everything silver,” she said. “Wouldn’t that be pretty?”

  “Okay,” I agreed, relieved. “Yes. It was pretty. Silver squirrels eating silver acorns, silver leaves blowing off silver branches, silver birds with silver nests, a big silver lake with silver sand castles on the shore and silver-tipped waves crashing in, rolling up silver seashells. Whatever the Silver Girl looked at turned silver, if she looked long and hard enough. If she concentrated.” I held one hand over my yawn; my hand smelled like chicken.

  “I bet that was how she turned silver,” Grace exclaimed suddenly. “She looked at herself in the mirror and concentrated really, really hard! And maybe that’s what they didn’t like, her changing, and her being all silver in their boring, old, ugly town, so she had to leave for exile and go somewhere silver to fit in.”

  “Hey, who’s telling this story?”

  “Chicago!” She bounced in her seat. “Chicago is silver, with a lake. Maybe the Silver Girl is there. All those big silver buildings. She was there, I know it.”

  “How do you know about the silver buildings?” I asked.

  “You sent me a postcard that one time,” Grace said. “Of silver buildings. I never get mail and it was so exciting that day I did, so I put the postcard under my mattress to save forever.”

  I’d forgotten sending the card my first fall, after I rode downtown on the el. I walked along Michigan Avenue, from Grant Park to Water Tower Place to the Oak Street Beach, and there was Lake Michigan sprawled out in front of me like it was all mine. I never felt freer in my life as I did that minute, like I’d finally reached the place I was supposed to be, and then that nag of guilt remembering Grace, so I bought a postcard of the skyline at Osco and mailed it. I should have sent other postcards, one every day, to show her how much more there was than the crud of here, than imaginary caves in imaginary forests; that the something more was real. I would this fall. So easy to buy some cheap postcards and lick a stamp. All I’d have to write was “Wish you were here.” It was the thought.

  Another mind-stopping yawn. She wasn’t coloring anyway. I said, “Let’s look at the card. We’ll go to bed and look at Chicago, and I’ll tell you the names of the buildings and we can pick which one the Silver Girl lives in.”

  Grace shook her head. “I don’t have it anymore.” She slid the stack of paper across the table, started shoving crayons willy-nilly into the box, some upside down, jamming them in when they crowded the rows, pounding on them with the flat of her hand. I tugged the box away from her. “Or the big clock.”

  “I thought you said you saved it. What happened?”

  “Daddy threw them away.”

  There was a moment of stillness, then she shifted her cast, which caught on the placemat, knocking it to the floor. I stamped my foot down on it, pushing it farther under the table. “Why did he throw away your postcards?” I asked. I imagined the words leaving my mouth in a silvery whisper.

  She stared down at the empty spot on the table in front of her. She wasn’t going to cry; she didn’t ever cry. It would have been easier if she did. She shrugged, shook her head. Finally she had an answer. Finally she said, “Because I did something wrong.”

  “No,” I said. “No, you didn’t.”

  She reached for her crayons, but I slid them out of her reach. She went back to silence.

  “No, you didn’t,” I said.

  “No, you didn’t,” I said.

  “No, you didn’t,” I said.

  She didn’t blink when she told me that her arm hurt and that she wanted to go to bed, and that the doctor who put the cast on smelled like onions, and that our mother stole a magazine from the hospital waiting room.

  “I’ll stay with you,” I said, as we tiptoed upstairs. We fell quiet as we passed through the hallway, resuming our conversation only when we were inside her room, with the door shut.

  “We’re not going swimming Saturday, are we?” she asked, tapping her cast with one finger.

  “We’ll do something else,” I said. “Dairy Queen. Maybe a movie.” I should’ve told her I’d be working Saturday. But she knew I needed the hours, needed the money.

  I helped her into bed—she decided to sleep in the shirt because the armhole of her favorite pink nightgown wasn’t big enough for the cast to go through—and I lay down next to her and clicked off the lamp. Her cast bumped up against the wall as she thrashed through the sheets for the ratty teddy bear, which she clutched with her cast arm. I waited for her to ask me to stay with her all night, and finally I said, “I’ll stay with you tonight.” I meant it. I really would. I stroked her dandelion-fluff hair, brushing it off her sweaty forehead, finding a slow rhythm. If only boys knew that this is what we wanted, I thought, everything could be so right and simple. If they knew. But we would never ask.

  She was already half asleep. She mumbled something, maybe calling me Sam; I really couldn’t hear what she said. She was talking into the teddy bear’s fur.

  I thought about my own broken arm back when I was eleven and how scary the skin looked once they sawed off the horrible cast: pale and fishy, the texture of marshmallows. Not even my own skin anymore, I thought, nothing here belongs to me. A strange thing to think at only eleven, but I remember thinking it. We didn’t get Christmas presents that year because we had to pay the doctor, or that was what they said. Grace was too little to remember; “She doesn’t even know what Christmas is,” I remember my father saying. I hung up a stocking anyway, and one for Grace, and one for my mother, but in the morning they were empty.

  “I said don’t touch me.” Grace swatted my hand away, crooked her arm up protectively over her forehead. I immediately tucked my hands under my armpits, pressed so the grease burn tingled. She didn’t want to be touched. Not even me, I thought, and the three words ricocheted around my head until pretty soon they didn’t.

  I lay on my back, listening to Grace breathe. It was a steady sound. I watched the blank, dark ceiling. If I stared too long, it pressed in, closer to me, and I’d look away to the sliver of light along the closed door. I felt the burning white of Grace’s cast. Something hot, an ember, something that would spark up. Something we were all afraid of, even him, at least a little bit.

  There was one moment when she woke up. “Where were you?” she asked.

  “I’m right here,” I said.

  “No. Then.”

  Nothing I could say. She knew. She knew everything. Maybe she wouldn’t remember this in the morning. But in case she did, I forced myself to slowly say the truth: “I needed the hours. I wanted the money. I’m sorry.” My words were tiny pinholes in the dark.

  For hours, I couldn’t sleep. Or maybe I was asleep. Maybe I dreamed all of this, everything.

  Footsteps. The toilet. The shower. Footsteps. The door. The car. Gone. Safe. For now.

  The light was shadowy as I tiptoed from Grace’s room to my own. I had barely half an hour before my mother would be up, so I stuffed clothes into a duffel. I threw in the half dozen books that would break my heart to leave behind and lose forever. Makeup, notebooks, a handful of pictures of the Silver Girl, a pillow, some framed photos of Grace. I had left boxes of my winter things, my bedsheets, in Jess’s garage, so I could travel lightly, and I liked
how that sounded in my head, traveling lightly, and how hefting my single bag onto my shoulder felt. Remarkable to learn how little one might need. Traveling lightly, traveling lightly. The words fireworked through my head, exploding into joy and relief. That wad of bills under my mattress, all the money I had in the world, went inside the envelope of the clippings about Linda. It wasn’t sad to realize I had so little. It was how to move fast.

  I was pulling the door shut at the second snooze of my mother’s alarm, and I walked through the dim streets to the bus stop. Because I was wearing a tank top, because I was walking a certain way, a guy pulled over and asked if I needed a ride and I said I did, to the Greyhound station or actually to Chicago, and he said he wouldn’t mind dropping me off at the interstate if that was really what I wanted, and he had long black hippie hair, probably a PhD student at the university, and I told him that was what I really wanted. Heading home, I said, and he said he hoped I had a nice visit.

  It wasn’t so bad—the truck driver who picked me up did chew, which was messy and disgusting, but he told funny stories about growing up in Lubbock, Texas, that made my stomach hurt from laughing as he drove us straight east, into the rising sun, on into Chicago, and he dropped me at an el line, and from there I figured out a city bus the rest of the way and I got myself to Jess’s parents’ house, and they were shocked to see me on their front porch, but Jess’s mom started crying when she hugged me, and I went into Jess’s room and bounced on her bed to wake her up and she said, “Oh my god!” and I don’t remember how I explained everything or if I did—my parents were getting a divorce, my parents had to go to Lubbock to take care of a sick relative—I had stories ready, but they didn’t matter, because though it had been weeks, Jess’s parents were so wrecked about Linda’s death that they didn’t talk to each other, and Jess was sleeping late every morning, staying up until three watching old movies, doing nothing to drag them over the humps to the end of each day, and so it was easy to see who I was and what I was there for: I played Jess. I talked. I told stories. I made them laugh or at least smile. I asked questions like what did they want for dinner and what brand detergent should I pick up at Dominick’s, and I told people on the phone that Jess’s mother wasn’t home when she was, and I weeded the garden and cut the grass, and I washed the cars and even did a pretty good wax, and I handwrote thank-you notes for flowers and casseroles and signed Jess’s mother’s name. Jess couldn’t do those things. They needed me. Who was the favorite now? I thought, ashamed of the question, embarrassed by my longing.

  Mostly, I was the person to talk to so you didn’t have to talk to the person you didn’t want to talk to. I was the person always around, meaning people had to stay polite. I hadn’t planned this out, not any of it. But there was an empty space and I fit myself into it.

  At Jess’s house, I slept in one of her twin beds, the door to Linda’s room always tightly shut even before her mother installed the deadbolt. No one spoke Linda’s name. There wasn’t a photograph displayed anywhere in the house that I saw, and maybe it had always been that way or maybe not. Some days her mother went back to bed after lunch, pulling the curtains, lying there in the shadows as the Cubs game played on the radio even though she hated baseball. Her father worked until midnight. Bottles clanked at the bottom of the trash bags I carried out to the cans. It was all familiar to me. It was how to make something fine when it wasn’t.

  For the first time in forever, I relaxed, just a little, for the ten days before the lease on the apartment started and I could move to Evanston and wait for Jess and wait for school and sit alone in the quiet, empty apartment, safe in my exile.

  TERRIBLE BEAUTY

  (fall, junior year)

  People were calling reporters to announce they were the Tylenol murderer. Or driving to police stations and demanding to see the chief. Or sending letters to newspapers, Congress, and President Reagan. There was a ransom note, which everyone thought was more real than the attention-craving kooks. Apparently it was a thing, that certain people liked confessing to splashy crimes, wanting to grab glory and get their picture on the front page. An article in the Trib said almost two hundred people confessed to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby in the 1930s. In the 1940s, fifty people told cops they murdered the Black Dahlia, some movie actress I never heard of. “It wastes I don’t know how many man-hours sorting through these false leads,” said one of the detectives. “Lot of these folks are so sure they did it, they beg for the lie detector to prove they’re right.” There should have been a name for the syndrome, something a hundred letters long, Frankensteined together from German words, because there were more crazy people than anyone knew, or maybe more guilty people.

  I read all this in the Trib, which still came each morning, though the bill was due back on the day of Penny’s mom’s funeral. Jess was the one who was supposed to write that check. She was required to read a newspaper for poli sci, with pop quizzes 10 percent of the final grade, so she signed us up for a subscription. With that bill unpaid, any morning would be the last, but the paper kept getting flipped up onto the porch. The uncertainty made me value it more, so I made sure to page through, reading the comics and the Tylenol murder articles. One day would be the last before the paper stopped. One day would be the last before Jess came back. I just didn’t know which day. I didn’t know when.

  On the morning I read about the false confessions, I had an appointment with my poetry professor from last spring. It was getting where I had to declare a major, so I wanted to ask about creative writing even though he’d given me a B. I was also planning to ask him about alewife poems, if he saved a folder of bad poems that students had written. My thought was to amp our relationship into something sophisticated, like the two of us could talk for real, not only about class and school. I imagined drinking sherry with him, or whatever poets drank, and maybe he’d tell me about his trips to London and Ireland, about seeing Yeats’s grave or Shakespeare’s house. I imagined us cozied in front of a fireplace, holding tiny glasses of sherry, me listening to him recite a new poem, and he’d ask what the title should be, and, with a confident little smile, I’d suggest “Element,” and that’s what would be printed in The New Yorker. Maybe that was why I was reading the paper so carefully, so if current events came up, I wouldn’t sound dumb. Last night I threw a half dozen combinations on the bed before picking the fuzzy lavender sweater to go with the black jeans that were almost too tight but only almost. I really wanted Jess’s black boots that she always let me borrow, but her room was still deadbolted, so it was my own ratty pair. I guess I was anxious about the meeting but also eager. If Jess were here, there’d be a pep talk, her telling me I was a great writer and the sweater was amazing and to spray perfume on my thigh. Except for Jess not being here, everything was normal. It was all so normal.

  The TV was on for noise, not the channel with Andy Griffith, but Donahue’s yammering. I didn’t want the people upstairs or anyone walking on the sidewalk outside thinking I was a girl all alone, though I was. Like the title of a painting: Girl Alone. Me, staring pensively. Me, alone.

  Rent was due in two weeks. If I used the money from Jess’s dad I could pay the whole month myself. But then I wouldn’t have that money anymore. Really, I didn’t know what was going to happen. Because then there would be the month after that. And the lease was in her name anyway.

  The Trib ran the murder tip line number every day, and it was announced on the TV news and even the radio. I had it memorized. When I couldn’t sleep, which was every night, I recited the numbers in my head, forward and backward. I multiplied them together, one by one except for the zeroes, over and over, until I finally reached the exact same answer twice.

  I imagined someone like me who knew those numbers by heart, punching them into a phone, saying, “I did it. I’m guilty. Drag me to prison.” Hoarse whisper or gutted scream? It was a twenty-four-hour tip line, so would you call in the morning, first thing, before losing your nerve, or would it be three A.M., your call waking th
e cop on duty, one or both of you drinking or drunk? Would they trace your call? Would someone be pounding down your door before the words were the rest of the way out? The steely click of handcuffs, the blurry mumble as you got Mirandized, lights blaring red and blue through your drawn curtains, the whirling drama of you, you, you, your confused neighbors peering through slats at windows, noticing you for the first time. Would it feel exquisite, exquisitely painful, your arms cranked behind your back, wrists bound tight in those heavy cuffs, the cop roughly shoving your body forward? I did it, your mind spins, yes, I did it, and it’s my fault, me, I’m the one.

  I imagined it like leaning against a boulder, and leaning and leaning, until finally it’s torn loose, barreling down a hill, and it’s gone. The relief. And the ache. What there is now is emptiness, and they send you back home, because you didn’t do it, because you’re no one, you’re nothing. The neighbors seeing that, too. But your secret heart still knows. Guilty.

  I would have to leave soon for my professor’s office, twenty minutes away, based on how fast we walked at this school. We walked fast because of the damn fucking cold, or because with only ten minutes between classes we had to book it between north and south campus, or because that was how to pretend it was okay being alone with everyone else strolling in cozy, laughing groups, or because we saw that hateful pig of a guy from the other night, or because your coat wasn’t close to warm enough for Chicago but nada money for a better one. Lots of reasons to walk fast.

  But I shouldn’t skip breakfast again, not that I remembered much food in the fridge, just half an inch of skim milk and a piece of leftover mushroom pizza in tinfoil, which maybe would keep my stomach from growling during my meeting and maybe keep me from wasting money on ice cream for lunch at the Cone Zone. So I went to grab the pizza to wolf cold but found clustered on the second shelf a six-pack of Tab, two strawberry yogurts, an egg carton, a stick of butter, and a container of small-curd cottage cheese. Immediately, I wondered if I had possibly bought all this and forgotten. Was I truly so absentminded? Was anyone in real life absentminded enough to walk to the corner store, drop items into a basket, dredge out a ten, match idle answers to the cashier’s idle chitchat, lug home a brimming grocery bag, and arrange these items fortresslike in a corner of the refrigerator? And not remember?