by JoAnna Novak
A knock shook the door. I ran into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror. Had I become prettier? My neck was still fine, pale and corded with the usual tendons, but my pupils were shiny and black-olive big, my under-eye shadows weren’t so hollow, and my lips were swollen. I pulled down the bottom one, searching for Lisa’s bite. But everything inside was the same: wet, smooth, occasionally veined, pink, healthy.
The knock repeated.
“Hola? Hello? Cariño?”
“Just a second!” I recognized that voice. I pulled on my jeans and put my foot straight through one of the holes at the knee. The fabric ripped all the way to the floor and the shreds hung like kite tails. The downy hair furring my calves and my contaminated black socks showed. Well. Whatever.
The knocking began again, slower and louder, stern, like a brute’s footsteps.
“Okay, okay!” I tucked my hair behind my ears and opened the door.
The two men’s bodies were angled toward one another. I’d interrupted a tête-à-tête.
“Holy hell,” said my Uncle Marky. His words were floppy: he sounded like, instead of Amherst, he’d gone to college in New Orleans. He wore a wool peacoat with a fat fur collar, the mink earmuffs Anna had given him for Christmas, and his huge camel-colored scarf. Maybe it was a shawl. It was so big it could probably wrap Shaq.
He rushed me with a hug. I pressed against his belly, and in his clutch I felt like an arm gripped by a blood pressure cuff.
Fernán pushed past us and went inside. He put his hands on his waist and immediately untied the Burberry plaid scarf around his neck.
“Theses places should charge for heat. El, did you turn this up?”
“I don’t think so.”
Marky looked around. “This is so eerie: this could be your mom’s first dorm room. I’m not kidding. Just the—everything. The ambiance.”
“That’s creepy,” I said. “Do you think that’s why she wouldn’t come get me?”
Fernán growled out a sigh. He shifted his weight and pointed his hip at Marky and frowned. Fernán was tough: once he’d been rolled in a convertible and an entire windshield had shattered on him. Every time he got a serious look, I couldn’t help wondering if part of him was remembering that.
“Time to go, Lil’ Bit,” said Marky. “You set?”
I picked up my binder and my mini backpack. I opened the closet and grabbed my coat. My uncles watched me. I could feel their thoughts: What does a fourteen-year-old do in a motel room? That girl—skinny as a last chance.
··
“Don’t let your mother convince you she’s a luddite,” said Marky. We were in his station wagon, heading to Jewel’s. Fernán was doing the driving, and Marky was ranting, his whole torso more in the backseat than the front. “She had a CD player before anyone I knew.”
“She’s too young for a cell phone,” said Fernán. “Fourteen?”
“No one’s too young. You need to be able to call us, no matter what, anytime. Just in case. Your mom and dad need those, too. Do other kids have mobiles at your school?”
I tried to picture all sixty-five of my fellow eighth graders. “I don’t think so.”
“There. You’ll be ahead of the trend. The first. Do kids still say radical ?”
I laughed. So did Fernán.
“You need to get out more.”
Marky moved aside his earmuffs and pretended to plug his ears. “Any-whooo. Do you have peanut butter at home, Elliot?”
I squinted. “Does that sound like Lean Cuisine or microwave popcorn?”
“Food deserts can be anywhere,” Fernán said. “In fact, you often don’t need to look any further than your own backyard. American’s healthiest go hungry.”
“Why do we need peanut butter?” I asked.
Uncle Marky swallowed. He shook his head. With his coat open, I could see the top of his chest, where a stab of green belonged to some new tattoo.
“Your mom’s favorite cookies,” said Fernán. “We’ve been debating the merits of crisscrossed versus uncrisscrossed since Halsted. Also, someone brought his cookie cutters.”
We turned into the parking lot and Fernán pulled up to the curb. Saturdays were bananas, Anna usually said. This Jewel was one of the only stores that still closed on Sundays.
Marky opened his door. “PB, eggs—hell, I’m stocking you up. I’ll assume barren. Elliot, you hungry?”
Fernán cleared his throat. I could just imagine the lecture.
“Actually,” I said. “Can you buy me some, um, vegan bread?”
··
When we got home, I went upstairs. Marky and Fernán were in the kitchen. They’d told me about my mother’s car accident: the black ice, the bridge. I’d cried, finally, but Marky hugged me and hugged me. She’s okay, Lil Bit, he’d said. She really is. We’d take Anna a tin of cookies at visiting hours—and, get me a cell phone.
I put my mini backpack and my Trapper in my closet, and touched Michael Jordan’s chest. The poster was cold. It felt like I’d just returned from summer camp or a year-long vacation, like I needed to unpack a million bags and collapse. The me-shaped crease remained on top of the comforter from yesterday’s post–Larry Billy Corgan session. My shades were up. A green light blinked on my computer.
I moved the mouse. I hadn’t logged out of AOL and I was bombarded with windows. I hinged over the desk and typed.
RoHo1984: Plz don’t be mad at me … more $$$?
(ElleGirl80: No.)
MasistahTurn612: Sorry I was a brat.
RoHo1984: You wanna come over Monday and show me exercise?
(ElleGirl80: No.)
RoHo1984: $20????????
(ElleGirl80: No.)
MalSuvialMolloy: Are we good?
(ElleGirl80: Yes.)
MasistahTurn612: The After’s in your mailbox.
(ElleGirl80: Sorry to be so slooooowww. Thank u!! You really look gr8.)
MalSuvialMolloy: Are we seriously cool though, Heroin Chic? I didn’t mean to play the rapesichord or anything, I just got caught up in …. Ummmmmmm. I know it’s not cool to chat this, but … do you wanna, like, go out sometime? Or come over? American History X comes out on VHS soon, and I’ve been wanting to see it. Think you’d really like it. I mean, if that’s not too … whatever. Ummmmmmm. They misprinted my number in the directory, but, like, call me. I’m 839-4714.
(ElleGirl80: Will U B home in 2 hrs? U hungry?)
In my parents’ room, I flipped through the Rolodex in the roll top desk. Anna kept a running list of my dad’s numbers in there. Under R, there were contacts for his hotels, in Sintra and Bali and Wolfsburg and Vienna and Shanghai.
I dialed. The receptionist’s voice sounded like a rare piece of classical music. I gave her my dad’s name. I stood, surveying the bedroom, the way I’d left it yesterday: I’d closed the closet door. Taken all my self-portrait Polaroids from the sheets. I should snoop more often.
I unbuttoned my jeans, waiting. In my head, I saw a list of everything I could tell my father, a scroll that would wind out the door and down the street and into the woods and through the river and blah blah blah. I could become a girl who shared secrets with adults.
Another operator came on the line. So sorry: Mr. Egleston has checked out. My heart sank. Then I stepped on the scale. From yesterday, I was minus two pounds. Emotions were overrated.
In the shower, I luxuriated. It felt good to get clean. There was always some boy in Health who said he didn’t need to wear deodorant in winter, and Ms. Cummins would have to explain sudoriferous glands. He was an idiot. I had been freezing for the last twenty-four hours, and I felt begrimed. Gross. I lathered my loofah, rubbed circles over the walnut-sized bones sitting like epaulets on top of my shoulders, scrubbed the tick-tock of my clavicle. I felt tenderness, love: I pounded the beaks of my hipbones.
I was using the handheld showerhead, wielding its flexible chrome hose, to pummel away the disappointing flesh of my butt, when I remembered the porn. The end. I thought it h
ad been boring, but now I understood. I adjusted the water from scalding to warm. The sisters had bathed each other, gently and sweetly, with shy smiles. First in a bath with a natural sponge; then, in an open stall. They had taken turns, kneeling between the other’s legs and moving the showerhead. I had learned something from those girls. You could come and come.
3 ·· ANNA
MY BODY: WHAT OF IT, prone, in a movable bed? My mind, a cork in a fishbowl. These are symbols. I can’t exactly do what I want. Bridled by propriety and braces or bandages or abrasions on my knees ribs feet, the mysteries of spine and spleen, flat mass that is the back. Not—well.
The lights are out, but it’s clear I’m in a hospital. I recognize from examinations and childbirth: scratchy Kleenex, a yellow shower curtain topped with a panel of mesh barring me from my roommate, a silent television mounted near the ceiling. Ficus, succulent, some precious plant. If I track my gaze backwards, I can see my pulse: greenly transformed into a spiky graph, pinched and soaring, like a freestyle jazz trumpeter, improvising the hell out of his solo.
Why don’t more people talk about the mute? The block that gets shoved in the trumpet. AKA the wife.
I can twist. Wiggle my toes. Wave my fingers like hocus-pocus-dominocus.
I mumble incantations: “I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real.”
Oh lord.
One year in every five.
Fucking this up means I rule it out.
Watch ambiguous pronouns, I write again and again on students’ essays.
This = killing myself, suicide, self-murder.
So unsexy to say it straight.
This = life.
Dear god. Anna, the clichés.
I wish I could be my daughter. Go back, redo after fourteen, folly with a filly, get off of men. Au revoir, Rot. Au revoir, Rolf.
He will have clogged the answering machine with messages, or at least sent me a paragraphless email, one big block of prose, lines and lines of Why, some meek middle, an optimistic ending: How can we make this work?
No, I don’t blame my mother, Oprah, but thanks for that question. It’s a gas. Filling the big shoes of other book club greats—Wally Lamb, c’mon!—and I wear a 37½. Oh, for the home viewers, that’s the French. I’m not walking around on skis. Ha! Not walking around much of anywhere, which is one of those surprising gifts in the life of a writer. I’m like the Jimmy Stewart, Rear Window, of poetry!
All right, chump. Enough. The room beeps and breathes with cords and plastic boxes, invisible batteries. The bed smells like old urine and Ralston. The sheets are shitty. I shut my eyes.
This was me, waking in the middle of the night.
··
“I’d like to call my husband,” I tell the nurse, who comes to check my blood pressure and clip a fancy clothespin on my finger, at some time, anytime, an hour after hours on hours. Morning.
Her face says: I’m frightened but I’ve always been that way, I swear—it’s you, but not you.
Her body says: Sometimes I exercise—mostly just walks.
She wheels over a nightstand with a phone; the buttons protrude like warts.
“This is international,” I say. “Any special codes or—?”
“Only local numbers, I’m sorry. You can buy a calling card from the gift shop.” She frowns at my condition. “I can run and fetch that, on my break in half an hour.”
“Kind. Too kind. ‘In the very temple of Delight, Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine.’”
Are we in the psych ward? the woman’s expression says. Order a transfer for this kook.
“Jesting,” I say. “I’ve got … calling my brother.”
··
“Professor Anna?” says an ebullient woman. “Is that you? I wasn’t sure of your last name, hon. Two versions on the chart. Slashed or dashed. What’s that?”
Beside my bed, Barbara holds a Dixie cup. Based on the way she shakes it, I expect pills. I hope for sedatives. Tranqs. Painkillers. A misgauged dosage. Something to bludgeon me.
“Hi,” I think I say. But this time, waking, I’ve lost my voice. My mouth unhinges and I croak. And when I check again, the nurse is no more Barbara than Michael Jackson is Michael Jordan. This nurse has a broad nose, a Hawaiian countenance. Her name tag reads Babette. She’s my age, which, from my vantage, looks—unpardonably—young.
She swings a table out from inside the bedframe; it sits before me like an arm in a sling. She sets down a tray.
“Will you show me you can eat, Mrs. Egleston?”
“Anna,” I say, but whatever’s happened to me makes my voice come out like the noise one saves for the dentist. Ahhhhhhnnnnnnnnnn.
With a switch, the nurse inclines my bed, so I’m leaning closer and closer to my food. There it is: a city of Styrofoam. Stewed prunes. Gray-blue yogurt. Raisin Bran. In cups, milk and orange juice. No coffee. A prayer card—maybe that’s supposed to revive me: it shows a glossy white sand beach, frothing waves, a sunset radiating yellow, orange, pink, red, smoked purple, black. Manawa, is printed in lilac, at the bottom.
I point to the text. The postcolonialist in me cringes. Dear anyone, please forgive me for assuming this woman can parse an unfamiliar term and offer, in my moment of weakness, “authentic” wisdom.
“Manawa,” she says. “I got a whole box of these at a garage sale. It’s nice to spruce up the meals, you know? We all know the food’s … Not exactly regerbilating. If you go on the web, Ask Jeeves or AOL, you can find … well. I checked, to make sure it wasn’t some satanical, Manson thing. It means, ‘Now is the moment of power.’”
I nod. Tantalizing epiphany.
(Not so fast, World. I’ll leave you yet.)
The nurse covers my hand with hers, fits a spoon in my grip.
“Can you eat the yogurt, Mrs.?”
Looky. My arm works. The pain is an afterthought, reverbing my ribs. I swallow the yogurt. The tannins parch my tongue. Saccharine. I abhor fruit-on-the-bottom.
“Okeydokey,” the nurse says. “You want TV?”
I shake my head and cringe a smile; she leaves. I wish she were Glenn Decklin and I were back in Laughlin, a freak wheeled in for observation. Try me, dullards, I’d say to my life-living, worthless colleagues. I’d raise an invisible mug: Here’s to feeling good all the time!
The room is not quiet. The door is ajar. In the hallway wheels roll across the floor, shoes scuff and squeak, printers—the kind with tear-off edges that medical institutions and the relegated-to-Building-13 administrators at COCC still use—wheedle and drone. Ugly machines. Ugly me. I don’t have to see my face to know it hurts, in an empurpled way, that my cheek is not my own. Some chthonic slut.
What else is there? I expect my brother will be coming soon, bearing Elliot. Rolf, flying business class, keeping it civilized with red wine before whisky. Good man. I shake out the napkin until it’s one-ply, in my palm. I scoop a spoon of dry Raisin Bran. Take your pick: cardboard or hospital food, all the taste scrubbed off in the feeble name of health. Texture, crunch: that’s all that remains. I chew and chew, bring the paper to my mouth, and spit.
4 ·· ELLIOT
SO MANY LITTLE THINGS I remember, I miss. Lisa hanging a Sun-Times cut-out of Matt LeBlanc in her gym locker, and I’m back in sixth grade. The smell of Gap Heaven on her piddly wrist, and we’re at Oakbrook Mall, riding up the escalator, ducking into the Disney Store, trying on costumes for really little girls. Cinderella dress, size 6X. Thinking a boy’s erection had the permanence of a pipe cleaner, a whole misinformed decade. A childhood of seeing my dad’s Jaguar pull into the driveway, the headlights winking twice, like, Hey, Smelliot! I’m home.
Then there’s all the stuff I remember that I’d rather forget. Those things are blurry, unpinned to my life’s timeline. “You go, girl,” for instance, is a phrase I can do without. Yet, everywhere, all over the country, I hear adult women launching this bad boy, like it’s a fiery missile heading for a wet target.
I’d rather forget
the bated breath nervousness of hospital waiting rooms. It never changes. That Saturday afternoon, two days before MLK Day, Marky and Fernán let me out at the triple-doored vestibule at Rush Hospital. The entrance was as a magnificent as one of the modern homes in Ridgedale—glass and transparency was the future. I checked in as a visitor and sat in a rocking chair. On TV, a black-haired man threw a fistful of herbs into a screaming hot pan. “Bam!” I read the closed captions, got hungry, turned to an end table crowded with Kleenex boxes and old magazines. I picked up a People and flipped to an exclusive with Calista Flockhart, scanning for numbers. The article, “Arguing Her Case,” reported the Ally McBeal star weighed 102 pounds. I smiled. Flaca, flaca, I was la más flaca. I felt so good.
The unmistakable smell of musk and jasmine wafted past me. I looked up. There was Lisa, wearing the snow leopard blanket like a robe, a fat furry hat sitting on her head like a book. Beneath her eyes were long howling streaks of mascara. A couple days ago, I would’ve imagined licking those clean.
“Hey!” I said too loud. A man in a Bulls Starter jacket shot me a thorny scowl.
She paused. Her eyes got saucer-big and crazy, the pupils like anime. For someone who claimed to be an actress, Lisa really needed those minutes to rehearse.
“What are you doing here?” she said. She took off her hat and squeezed it to her chest. “Stalker much?”
“My mom’s upstairs,” I said. “She’s …”
I swallowed. My mouth tasted like the water I sucked out of washrags in the showers when I was desperately hungry. I so badly wanted to say I was scared. Of course, it hit me: I could still want to say that—and not say it to Lisa.
