In Her Skin

by Kim Savage

  Bostonians are really, as a race, far inferior in point of anything beyond mere talent … decidedly the most servile imitators of the English it is possible to conceive. It would be the easiest thing in the world to use them up en masse. One really well-written satire would accomplish the business. But it must not be such a dish of skimmed-milk-and-water as Lowell’s.

  “Satire?” I say.

  “Yup. He’s saying they are fools and easy to fool. And he wants to skewer them, not be wimpy about it like the other author, Lowell.” You pull your hair back in an elastic, popping your ribs, enjoying the stretch. I feel the stretch in my own spine and arch my back.

  You catch me mirroring you. You like it.

  Before I can make a joke, you hide your smile behind your hand and point to the gray paper. “See here? What’s cool is that you see this brilliant work. Then you see the man, who’s kind of a snob. The two are not the same. Here, in this strange, sterile little place, you find the truth. Poe’s work doesn’t define him.” You press your lips, staring at the page.

  I might speak rougher than you, have a rougher mind than you. But it doesn’t take Einstein to tell me that you’re saying your work as a first-rate student doesn’t define you. You can relate to Poe, and that’s how it is with rich girls who have everything. You’re always looking for someone to relate to you. If you knew who I really was, maybe you’d be saying my work as a con doesn’t define me, either. I like this unfolding of you, ribs popping, knobby parts revealed. The air here is dead and switched on at the same time, and I wonder how often you come here for answers, and if there are answers here that will define us. Definitions would be good: you are Temple, and I am Vivi, but are we friends?

  We say nothing for a while, staring at Poe’s snobby letter. It is cold in this room and the librarians change shifts. Your eyes flick up when they pass. My stomach growls. I haven’t eaten since breakfast, and it’s funny how Mrs. Lovecraft can be so careful about some things and so forgetful about others. I am on the verge of asking about “the Dickinson” you’d asked to see along with “the Poe” when the sleeping man releases a death rattle.

  You rise. “Time to go,” you say, tucking your laptop under your arm, heading through the door and into the dark lobby, past the desk where we were buzzed in.

  “What about your bag?” I call helpfully.

  You stop short and turn, smiling tightly. The librarian hands you your backpack and computer case and once again you are off.

  I scramble to follow.

  “Where are we going?” I ask stupidly. This is becoming my thing, asking Nervous Nelly questions: straight man to your zany. Maybe it was Vivi’s thing, too.

  “To have fun,” you reply.

  Fun is not the word I would choose to describe libraries. I’d go for safe, clean, even warm.

  “I’m in!” I say.

  “That sounds like the old Vivi,” you say as the door closes behind us in the Koussevitzky Room. “Do you know that you can’t be videotaped in a public building if there isn’t a sign warning you that you’re on camera?”

  Um, yes. “I did not know that.”

  The room has huge posters that show Koussevitzky was a conductor, and the room is encircled by a rickety-looking inner balcony. I’m wondering if we’re going to scale the balcony, but you’re already at the door to another room with a sign that says DWIGGINS.

  “Be prepared for your mind to be blown,” you warn. You are cute and devilish and you think this is so crazy, and I’m starting to get you, Temple Lovecraft. This is your way of rebelling, pretending to be a college student to look at musty pieces of paper and breaking into secret rooms without permission, and you’re adorkable.

  You slip inside and I follow. We’re surrounded by lit windows. Behind the glass are wooden puppets on strings. There’s a tin man, a bearded magician, and a beanie-wearing dude with a long black cigarette and a rabbit. There’s a dragon. A floating ghost-skeleton and a juggler. This is the stuff of nightmares and this is what you get off on and you are a freak. Above each scene is another lit window, where the puppet handles are, crosses of wood with strings, and they look unattached.

  “Cool,” I whisper, because this seems like a place where you whisper. But really, I don’t want to wake up those puppets. “It’s like they’re not even on strings.”

  “It’s an illusion. If you did cut their strings, they’d collapse,” you say.

  You have a soft spot for these puppets, and I’m a sucker for soft. I cannot imagine having affection for anything so creepy, and it puts me in mind of Keloid Kurt, a scarred dude in Tent City who kept a mangy pet rat that he would stroke and coo at. Because I am smart, I see you are trying to tell me you feel like a puppet with that pressure to be perfect, with your parents controlling the strings, and I am moved.

  “They’re really cool, Temple. Thanks for showing them to me.”

  “Do you want to see how they’re made?”

  You also like to teach, and I am guessing Vivi liked to be taught. Living in someone else’s skin is a lot easier when I’m being led.

  “Yeah, totally.”

  We leave the room of the wooden undead, and there are official-looking visitors who probably know the room is off-limits, so we have to hang and pretend we had special permission to be in there. You drop to the floor, crisscross applesauce, and ask me to dictate notes to you about the puppets, and I’m left making things up like, “The floating ghost-skeleton is approximately twelve inches in height and represents man’s inhumanity to man,” as the visitors look on, impressed. I am pulling this out of my butt, something I read in a book once, and they nod and smile. You hang your face over your keyboard and try not to laugh. The visitors lose interest and leave.

  “Impressive. You don’t sound like someone who missed years of school stuck in a shed,” you say, throwing your laptop into its bag and zipping it fast, but before I can stress about my carelessness you grab my elbow and drag me into the next dark room, laughing, fumbling for the switch. When the lights go up, we are in Frankenstein’s laboratory. Headless wooden bodies lie in lines on a worktable. One has holes at the tops of its thighs, and we peek inside. There are sharp tools, crude mechanical tools, and something that looks like a vise. This is where the magic happens. Men should not play with dolls, and although you’re supposed to think tinker, I am thinking torture, and I have no need to be in this room longer than necessary.

  “They’re harder to control than they look,” you say. I wonder how much time you have spent playing with puppets, but it makes sense, since you’ve got the kind of rich family that would be big on expensive, “classic” toys.

  “I bet.” It sounds stupid and way overboard and you look at me and burst out laughing.

  “Not that I’ve spent much time playing with puppets,” you say.

  “Not that I’ve spent that much time playing,” I add, and it’s okay to say that, because even if it’s because I’ve been working cons my whole life, it could also be because I spent half my life in a shed.

  You just think I’m being funny.

  “Not that I would play with freaky wooden puppets if I could,” you say.

  “Not that those freaky wooden puppets wouldn’t spring to life and attack you if you did,” I say.

  “Not that that’s not exactly what happened to this Dwiggins dude,” you say.

  “Not that that’s not exactly the way the Dwiggins dude wanted it to go down,” I say.

  “We’re not being respectful.”

  “You’re right. Rest in peace, puppet master. May you always feel a cool wooden hand on your back…”

  “And the tug of a string at your shoulder.”

  “Nice! Amen.”

  “Amen.” Your eyes go flat. “When did you get so funny, Vivi Weir?”

  My throat catches. “I’ve had some time to work on my material.”

  You hold your stomach and wag your finger at me. “Very nice!” You check your watch. “We better go. After you.”

&n
bsp; We are becoming easy in each other’s spaces, and this is special. You shut off the light and the door slams behind us. We laugh as we make our way back through the near-empty halls and it gets louder as we get closer to the bigger rooms where the unspecial people flock to so they can check stuff off their unspecial, touristy lists.

  We huddle together as we head for the Copley Square train stop, and it is early for friendly huddling, but what the heck, I go for it. Though you are tall and Y-shaped where I am small and on the scrappy side, we fit nicely together, and you smell less like clean and more like candy. You pass me a stick of black licorice. Black licorice reminds me of the NyQuil one of Momma’s boyfriends sipped when he had the shakes, but I’ve never tried it, and if there was ever a time to try new things, it’s now. I chew, thinking how the library was my old safe place, a habit. I don’t need it as my safe place anymore, and it’s time for new habits, like eating black licorice. You duck down the subway stairs. I turn to look at the library, the stick of licorice flopping from my mouth, when I hear it.

  “Jo!”

  I freeze. My mouth falls open. The licorice drops.

  Wolf rises. He was sitting on the library steps as I walked down. I must have strolled right past him. And now I know that I did; he was the boy my eyes saw but my mind didn’t, with his face hidden in his knees and his sneaker tapping. Now I see his eyes are shaded gray and he is in a bad way, on or off something.

  A wave of guilt and sickness washes over me. My mouth moves, but nothing comes out.

  “Vivi!” you yell, commuters swirling around your upturned face. “We’re going to miss our train!”

  Wolf’s jacket flaps in the wind and he extends his hand toward me. His wrist is pale and thin. I feel your eyes on my back, impatient. Wolf is sinking and reaching for me and I have to go.

  “I’m so sorry,” I mouth to Wolf.

  His eyes storm. Wolf is a boy who becomes more beautiful when he rages, which is why he glazes over when he hustles. People walking past eye him, and though he is obviously homeless, his beauty is magnetic, and those who can’t have him will stare. A middle-aged man in a suit stops and says something to him. Wolf stares only at me. He tells the man something—his fee, I know this—still looking at me. I know this is one of those moments that I will regret the rest of my life, but yours is not a life I can live, and Wolf, I need to leave you.

  “I have to go.” My whisper is lost in the length between us.

  “Vivienne!” you call over the screech of the inbound train. You’re fidgeting halfway down the stairs, looking at the train over your shoulder and back at me.

  You throw up your hands, mouthing, “What the?”

  When I turn back around Wolf is in front of me.

  I have exactly one choice. I dig in my pocket and pull out the twenty-dollar bill. I hand it to him, and say loudly, “God bless.”

  I run down the stairs, pressing my fist into my mouth to hold back the sob.

  * * *

  We’re getting knocked around, holding the same train pole when you ask me why I gave that street kid money.

  “I felt sorry for him. Pay it forward, you know? Make the world a better place,” I say, looking at a spot on the floor.

  “That’s a generous outlook for someone who’s been through what you have,” you say.

  I’m grateful when the train stops and a mob of people press in. I make a big deal out of rearranging myself, pretending to forget your question. But you stand with your feet planted, hardly noticing people cramming around you, some fixing dirty looks.

  “I mean, I’d be hating the world right about now,” you say.

  “I try not to focus too much on what happened,” I say, squirming.

  “In the shed?”

  “Yes.” I stare hard at the top of a child’s head.

  “We all have pasts we can’t change. Would you rather not talk?” you offer.

  I nod. You smile and shift to give me room. The rest of the ride we’re silent and this is a good thing, because I can hardly hold myself together after having seen Wolf, and you think I’m having Bad Shed Thoughts. I imagine Wolf waiting for me to come home the night that I left, then the next morning, and the mornings after that, choosing not to believe I won’t come back. His saying nothing as I passed him on the library stairs was strange and unexpected and I am grateful. The pain isn’t the same as when Momma died. It’s loss dunked in guilt, and I hate myself so much I want to bite my fist. As we walk down Commonwealth Avenue and approach the brownstone, I shove my hand in my pocket to keep from biting it. My fingers brush something velvety. I stop and pull it out of my pocket. You sense I’m not behind and turn at the top of the stairs. Your hair, loose now, lashes your cheeks in the wind.

  You wear a small smile.

  I blink in disbelief at the scrap of paper between my fingers. The year 1866 is scribbled with faded pen strokes, and the words PROPERTY OF BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY are stamped inside a red oval.

  “It’s fine,” you say, climbing down slowly. When you reach the last step you giggle, brushing a loose hair from my cheek. “I won’t tell my parents you stole it.”

  * * *

  A death blow

  is a life blow

  to some

  Who till they

  died did not

  alive become.

  Who had they

  lived, had died

  but when

  they died,

  Vitality begun.

  I do not appreciate having this and this is wrong and you know it. There is no way to return it and we are on camera and it’s on record that we were the last ones to have it. Now I’m stuck waiting until you get home to explain how we’re going to fix this. You hid from me all night and I heard you leave in an Uber early this morning, while I was still in bed, and you have my precious parts in your hand right now.

  And yet it is cool, owning something that was written by a famous poet in 1866. I wonder what the value of an original Dickinson poem is. The Lovecrafts haven’t given me access to the Internet, not that I’m stupid enough to do searches anyway. I mostly care about this because it’s going to piss the Lovecrafts off. They can never know. You are sneaky and a troublemaker, but you are also warm and goofy, and this is your idea of fun.

  I brush my teeth like mad, because Vivi’s teeth were bright and strong.

  “Vivi?”

  I spray the mirror with Crest. Mrs. Lovecraft stands behind me. I cringe, dabbing at the mirror with a towel too fancy to be used to clean up toothpaste, and then cringe at that, apologizing.

  Mrs. Lovecraft reacts to none of it. “I wondered if we might have a word?”

  This is it. I am going down. Temple, you are a foxy trickster, and this is your way of getting rid of your unasked for, unplanned for new sister, the reappearing playmate you didn’t want or need, given your “loads of friends.” I was a fool to think this would work.

  “Sure. Should I get dressed?” I ask, pointing at my pajamas, which probably cost what Wolf earns in an hour.

  Wolf.

  “Just come down. We’ll talk over breakfast.”

  I stop in my bedroom and shimmy into my bra underneath my pajama shirt. My MO is zero sexuality in the Lovecraft household, not only to remind them of forever-nine Vivi, but also to avoid threatening my new mother, because, been there. I pad down the stairs, still feeling naked in my pajamas, the polished steps slippery under my socked feet. In the kitchen, Mr. Lovecraft stands with his back to me and his phone held to his ear with one broad shoulder, and Mrs. Lovecraft is seated at the counter. A fourth stool appeared at some point and I have a spot, and at my spot sit fresh fruit and four kinds of granola and Greek yogurt and I will never get used to choices, though I would like to. Mrs. Lovecraft insists we can eat and talk at the same time, in fact, maybe she’ll have some yogurt, too. (She won’t. I haven’t seen her eat a full meal yet.) I fill my bowl with yogurt and granola and fruit. As Mr. Lovecraft turns and catches sight of me, his eyebrows rise, because
he has not yet watched me eat, though Mrs. Lovecraft is already used to my rough ways. Mrs. Lovecraft shoots him a look, and he ends his call.

  “Where’s Temple?” I ask between slurps and crunches. If they’re going to toss me for stealing a valuable poem, I’m going to inhale as many calories as I can during my best last meal.

  “It’s Saturday. She has cello.” Mrs. Lovecraft says this like the world knows Temple Lovecraft has a cello lesson on Saturdays. “Which works out well, because this is a conversation meant for us three.”

  Natch. Why involve your perfect daughter in the sleazy details of my crime?

  “Okay,” I mumble, wiping my mouth with my napkin. Mrs. Lovecraft looks to Mr. Lovecraft, who has shaved his beard as predicted. In sweatpants and a tee, he is more boyishly handsome than I thought, and she thinks this, too, the way she gazes at him, which is not the way he gazes at her. I make a mental note of this, because it could be useful in the future. Mr. Lovecraft sits awkwardly at the counter. His knees and elbows jut at strange angles, like yours. He is a man used to taking up space.

  “As you can imagine, the police are very interested in catching your abductor. In fact, they won’t let the matter rest until he is found,” he says.

  “They’re doing their job, of course,” she adds.

  “But we understand your need to put this behind you. Not to allow this criminal to steal one more second of your precious life.”

  “Moving forward is best.”

  “Best for you. And what’s best for you is our concern. Especially since you remember so little of your time in the shed, isn’t that right?” he says, but maybe insists.

  I nearly miss my cue, still thinking about Emily Dickinson in my underwear drawer filled by Mrs. Lovecraft with clean cotton wonderfulness. “Mmm.”

  “We understand that there is a perpetrator at large and that he could strike again. But here’s the thing. If you remember so little—”

  I never said that I remember so little. The second rule of conning: never forget what you claim.

  “—then the chances of catching him are slim. Yet the police won’t rest until they find him. There will be endless procedural interviews. They won’t let you move on. But you have a choice here. You can make it stop.”