And Again

by Jessica Chiarella

  “Think they’re fucking?” Connie asks.

  “Who?” I say, a particularly strong gust of wind and her question nearly knocking me sideways.

  “Hannah and David. All they do is make eyes at each other. They don’t argue anymore,” she says, pulling her scarf a bit tighter. “Maybe they’ve found a new way to direct all of that energy.”

  “Oh. I don’t know,” I reply. This sort of gossip has always made me nervous, even back when it was the other mothers on the playground.

  In the distance I hear a saxophone playing a stilted rhythm, the sound of it warping in the wind. The winter air tastes crisp and the bridge over the Chicago River shudders a bit under our feet as traffic speeds past. It’s my favorite place in Chicago, that bridge, the place where on a bright, perfect day you can see the glass of the buildings and the water shimmering in a perfect harmony of light and lack of color. It feels like heartache now, looking at it, like driving by your childhood home and finding another family living there.

  “Want to stop for some cocoa?” Connie asks, motioning to Café Descartes on the corner, its windows fogging a bit from the heat of cramped bodies and the steam of espresso machines. Yes, I think. Cocoa would be nice.

  “What if I had a baby?” I say. It sounds more like a question than I mean it to. Connie halts so suddenly at my words that a man in a wool coat nearly runs into her. I have to pull her forward by her sleeve as we weave our way through the throngs of shoppers. She looks at me like I’ve said something complimentary about Hitler. All right, I’ve found Connie’s threshold for surprise.

  “Why would you want to do that?” she asks, and even the smoky puffs of air escaping her mouth are lovely and delicate. But her words open up a well inside me, like pulling at a loose thread until things begin to unravel.

  “We’ve always wanted more kids. We talked about it, way back before the accident,” I reply, but she shakes her head.

  “You know, the more you try to convince your husband that you’re the same person as you were before, the worse things are going to be for you.” Her nose is pink and running a little, and she bats at it with the sleeve of her coat. “Christ, Linda, you just said you were going to leave him. You’re not just trying to go back to your old life, you’re trying to go back to a life you didn’t even want in the first place.”

  I realize, too late, that she doesn’t understand that I’m already pregnant. She thinks I’m asking her whether or not I should try. I start back down the street, making her follow. Connie catches up to me halfway down the block.

  “Why would you even ask me?” she asks.

  “What do you mean?” I pull the collar of my coat up around my throat. The temperature is dropping and I feel a bit feverish. I think back to when I was pregnant with Katie, how my temperature ran high for a month before I figured out that I wasn’t fighting off a virus.

  “You have your mind made up already, don’t you? Why would you want my opinion?” Connie asks.

  “I wanted your opinion because I thought we were friends,” I reply, though I know it’s petty and unfair of me. She grabs my arm then, pulling me toward a bench out of the streaming path of people walking down Michigan Avenue. People are ice skating at Millennium Park, making the most of the lingering cold, winding in lazy circles around the rink as a cheesy song from the eighties plays in the background. A song that seems familiar, though I can’t place it. I can’t remember how I know it. This is how music is, now. Even when I can remember a song’s lyrics, its melody, it never takes me back. I never feel anything when I hear it.

  “We are friends,” she says, looking up at me, and it’s the first time I realize that I’m taller than she is. Her face is intent on mine. “We are friends,” she repeats, her cold hand clasping mine. I get an odd sort of sexual thrill out of it, a feeling so potent I have to take a deep breath to crush it back down. “Which is why I think you asked me so I would talk you out of this.

  “You just got control back,” she continues. “For the first time in eight years, this body is yours. Do you really want to give that up so soon?” Her hand is still in mine, and I’m so dumbfounded by this, by the weight of my uncertainty, that all I can do is get angry. I wrench my hand away from her.

  “Maybe I thought you’d be happy for me, that I’m getting on with my life,” I say, wanting to tell her that it’s too late. That it’s too late, and now I wish I could take it back. So all I can do is defend it. “But you don’t want any of us to move on, do you? Because you don’t have anything else.”

  Connie doesn’t say anything to this. She just turns and begins to walk again, but I don’t follow. I watch her back as she moves, the perfect delicacy of her limbs, the slope of her shoulders underneath her wool coat, and it feels like a part of my secret world, the beautiful place, has cracked off and pulled away from me, an iceberg splintering under the heat of the sun. And once again, the horizons of my life seem to constrict around me.

  When I get home I head straight to the attic. On the days when I’m alone, when Tom is locked up in his office and the kids are at school, I scale those dusty steps and kneel down on the floor and retrieve my artifacts from their dark little home. I do this now, because my conversation with Connie has left me shaken, left me feeling feverish and disconnected from the world inside me.

  I lay them out in front of me, my treasures. There’s the wrapper from the candy bar. I flattened it out, the perfect silver foil of it, between two books from the shelves downstairs, like pressing a flower to preserve its beauty. There’s the little metal-and-glass saltshaker from the pizza place where we ate a few weeks ago, which left a dusting of gritty white crystals in the seam at the bottom of my purse. Next to it is a pair of earrings from the trashy little jewelry store in the mall where Tom bought Katie a basketball pendant for Christmas. They’re little ladybugs, red with black spots, and they looked like a pair of forbidden apples tempting me from their rotating metal rack. I was surprised how easy that one was, considering the mirrored ceiling and the hawk-eyed salesgirls. Though, of course, they were keeping a much closer eye on the teenagers bopping around the store than on me. There are other things too, a pen, a votive holder, some 9-volt batteries, a tester bottle of perfume from the cosmetics stand at a department store.

  I spread them out on the floor and run my fingers over them, reveling in the sweet tingle that erupts within me like the baking soda and vinegar volcano Jack made for science class. Connie’s words grow dim, eclipsed by the remembered thrills of all these pilfered items. Just looking at them lights up something inside me, as keen and sharp as a memory.

  Connie

  I use the last of my final disability check to book an airline ticket to Los Angeles. The fact that it was my final two hundred dollars made the decision, which I had been ignoring ever since the transfer, suddenly unavoidable. I’d spent the past few years living on the paltry sum I received from the government for being too sick to hold down any substantial sort of employment, subsisting on ramen noodles and peanut butter bought with food stamps, wearing my clothes until they were threadbare in my tiny, dirty apartment. But even I can’t live on nothing, and I’m not about to endure my landlord’s greasy stare, his innuendos and loaded suggestions, if I have to beg for an extension on my rent.

  At 5 a.m. I take the Blue Line to O’Hare, dressed in the only outfit I have left fit for such an errand, a white shift dress and ancient Christian Louboutins that I could never bear to get rid of, with their four-inch heels and snakebite-red soles. It’s a classic sort of look, sexual in its simplicity. Hollywood glamor. It’s the outfit I was planning on being buried in.

  I’m not staying over in L.A., so I carry only a purse containing lipstick, my ID, and the one credit card I have left that isn’t maxed out. That’s the thing about assuming you’re going to die, you don’t make smart financial decisions when it comes to planning for the future. Which is another reason for my trip; ever since my disability checks stopped, the creditors have begun calling. I glanc
e at my reflection in the glass of the train window as we dip underground. I look jagged and fierce, a version of myself that is a little sharper-jawed and sunken-cheeked, something like the way I looked when I was sick. The image is ghastly and too familiar, all of that beauty spoiled by poor lighting and murky glass.

  When we reach O’Hare, I check in at my terminal and begin snaking my way through the security line, pulling off my sunglasses as a blue-gloved TSA agent scrutinizes my ID photo, glancing back and forth between the card and my face. I know what she sees, a woman who is undeniably the same, yet nearly completely different from the photograph. Any sign of my age has disappeared, all the worldliness is gone from my face. I am blank, and pure, and alight with possibility. She seems perplexed by what she sees, but she shines a flashlight on my ID and then hands it back to me. For a moment I think she’s going to ask me the name of my plastic surgeon, but then she waves me through without a word.

  My earrings set off the metal detectors, of course. And I get that familiar panicked prickle in my skin when I’m waved over to a secured area to be searched. A female TSA agent pats me down, but all of the men in the vicinity watch with wet mouths and fixed eyes. I don’t look at any of them. I show my defiance in the absolute boredom on my face. They are insects, a trifle. I show them that I submit to them only because I can’t bring myself to care enough to resist. Another familiar feeling.

  I’m flying coach, which I detest, wedged into a sticky foam seat, staring out the window while the businessman next to me tries to make conversation. I ignore him, mostly. He’s not bad looking, but after all, he can’t be too impressive if his company flies him coach. Instead I play over the whole scene in my head. What I will say. How I will look, in my simple dress and my sex-kitten heels, with a fresh lick of red lipstick across my mouth. It will be all right, all of it, the greedy press of my landlord and my ringing phone and my empty mailbox. If I can look half as good as I imagine, it will be just fine.

  I was probably twelve when men began to notice me. They noticed my mother first, of course, because who wouldn’t notice Betts? At least, back before she found God and let herself go. I remember sitting on the front steps of our trailer while my mother smoked a slow succession of cigarettes, the midsummer sun shimmering off the sweat that collected in the base of her throat and in the crease between her breasts. I was enthralled by her even then, the beauty of her, and my own importance in being her daughter.

  “Don’t slouch,” she’d say, glancing at me out of the corner of her eye before going back to observing the rows of trailers that surrounded us, like a monarch surveying her kingdom. “You remember those ballerinas on TV? Those are the rarest sort of women in the world. Rich people pay obscene sums of money to sit there and watch them move. Imagine two thousand pairs of eyes on you, and you never have to say a word. Imagine being that powerful. Do you think they slouch when they sit down?”

  I’d shake my head, straightening my spine until my back ached with the effort. What would two thousand pairs of eyes feel like? Even one pair often felt like too much, especially when it was Larry, who lived across the way with his small pack of Dobermans. I could feel him looking at me, the nicotine-stained fingers of his hand scratching across the round sack of his belly as he watched me leave for school in the mornings. It was a hot feeling, being watched by him. Like breaking out in hives. Two thousand pairs of eyes felt like an impossible number. I imagined splintering apart under the press of all that attention. But even then, there was a part of me that grew excited at the thought. There was already a part of me that reveled in the idea of being wanted that badly.

  After a while it wasn’t just Larry. There was Hank, whom my mother hired whenever the plumbing in the trailer wasn’t working, which was nearly all the time. Later in my teens I’d point out to my mother that Hank probably didn’t know what the fuck he was doing, considering the pipes seemed to always be broken, no matter how many times he fixed them. And later still, it would occur to me that Hank probably had a stake in keeping those pipes in poor shape. But at twelve, doing my homework at the card table in our kitchen or lounging on the couch watching TV, I wasn’t sure why I’d suddenly been caught within the focus of Hank’s gaze. He’d whistle under his breath as he clanked around under the sink, and he’d call from the kitchen to ask me for a glass of water from the tap in the bathroom. He’d look up at me when I obliged him, from his place on the floor, and I’d feel ten feet tall hovering over him and handing him the glass. He had a blond goatee that was flecked with gray, and he wore square glasses with silver frames. I’m sure I’d find him very attractive now, but back then I never did know what to think.

  “Does your mother let you out of the house wearing that?” he’d say, motioning to my shorts, cut off so high on my legs that white triangles of pocket hung below the frayed edges of the denim. I’d shrug, snap my gum. I wasn’t much for talking back then, trying to have no use for words. “What kind of music do you listen to? You like Johnny Cash?”

  He started bringing me mix tapes when he came over, labeled in black marker, and I’d play them in my mother’s boom box while he worked. It was a lot of country, which I didn’t much care for, but there would be the odd song by the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin that I’d recognize.

  “Dance, Chicklet,” he’d say, using the pet name he’d chosen for me. I didn’t know if it was because he called all the women in the trailer park “chicks,” and I was a miniature version of them, or if it had something to do with the gum I always chewed. I never did ask. I never danced for him either, but I did bring him water, and I’d stand there as he drank it, feeling him watch me as he swallowed it down, feeling like I was a tacit participant in an exchange I didn’t fully understand.

  The women in the trailer park, the ones who didn’t have husbands, or who had husbands who weren’t worth a damn, used to talk about Hank like he belonged to them. I’d leave my window open at night and listen to my mother and her friends tease him in the dark as he walked home from the bar down the road, their voices making the night wind feel even slower, even hotter, as it drifted in through my screen. I used to imagine myself talking to men that way, with those long, heavy tones. I’d listen to him tease them back, his voice a bit too loud, and listen to their laughter. I wondered if I belonged to him the way he belonged to them, if there was a pecking order and I was at the end of it. He fixed the sink when my mother asked, and when he asked I brought him water and stood there as he looked at me. I wondered if desiring something made it yours already, just a little, simply through the act of wanting it.

  Then there were the boys at school. Older boys, teenagers already out of junior high. My friends and I would pass by the high school’s football field on the way home, and the boys at practice would shout at us, calling me “blondie,” trying to get us to stop. We didn’t stop because that was where our power came from, to be wanted and to have the ability to deny ourselves to others. Instead we’d walk to the 7-Eleven and buy pops and smoke cigarettes in the parking lot until the sky darkened above us and we were no longer afraid of being recognized walking in the direction of the trailer park. It was easier that way, better to be from nowhere than to be from there. Better to be anonymous, to be wanted from afar and always called a name that wasn’t my own. Up close was when things got difficult; it was harder to be perfect when you were spread out beneath some boy in a truck or in his grandma’s basement, hearing the blare of Telemundo on the TV upstairs, the mildew of the carpet permeating everything and making your skin itch. Up close I’d have to close my eyes and imagine Hank and the way he looked at me to get myself to come. And I never felt powerful afterward.

  I learned my mother’s lessons well, in those years. What she meant when she talked about the ballerinas, women so beautiful they could command silence and stillness and admiration from crowds of onlookers simply by the way they moved. I understood that beauty was a currency, so highly valued that it burned ancient cities and ruined the most powerful of men, so potent th
at it could pluck me from my meager upbringing and wipe out all of my history like a tide washing away footprints in sand. If you had enough, it didn’t matter who you were. You could be anyone.

  I can feel it as I walk east on Wilshire Boulevard. Even in the corners of L.A. where wealth and culture and beauty are at their most concentrated, I can feel people notice me. Some pause for a moment, trying to place me, wondering if I’m some young starlet they saw in a movie once. Some pretend like their eyes aren’t tracking me as I pass, women mostly, looking at me with expressions that range from admiration to unadulterated envy. And then there are men, who seem not to care if they’re caught staring, men with eyes like two dark challenges, who want me to look back at them. Men who look me up and down as I walk, men who honk from taxis or cat-call from construction sites. I’ve forgotten how intrusive it is, to be the object of such universal male attention. Sort of like being naked and on display. Sort of like having no skin at all.

  My old agent, Harry Kramer, has an office in one of the high rises that are ubiquitous along Wilshire. I don’t realize how cold I am until I’m in the lobby, where the light from the antique chandeliers overhead seems to bathe everything in warmth. I bypass the front desk and head straight into an elevator, my ears popping as it lifts me to the twentieth floor. Harry’s office is the same as I remember it, all polished wood and frosted glass, though the girl at the desk looks so young I nearly turn back around as soon as the elevator doors open. But she looks a little startled when she sees me, and there, the powerful feeling is back. I take off my sunglasses, the large Audrey Hepburn frames, and smile at the poor thing.