I hadn’t expected it to happen in Prague, but there I was in the first week of November, throwing coconuts out a four-story window.
•
So, yes, there was screaming. And, yes, pushing. Their bodies were stumbling in and out of the spotlight, so I couldn’t tell who started what, who was grabbing who, or who was trying to stay or go. Maybe she wanted to run away and he caught her. That made sense. What father would let his teenage daughter roam the streets in the middle of the night? But maybe, maybe he’s a big ol’ dickwad, and she was trying to get away from him. There are rules about that stuff in the Czech Republic, right? Were they Czech? They weren’t speaking Czech. At least, I didn’t think so, but my Czech was pretty shitty, then and always, even after I took tons of classes and did the Rosetta Stone CDs.
How do you say, “My dad’s a dick?”
How do you say, “Leave me the hell alone?”
How do you say, “Help me.”
Pomozte mi.
Pomozte mi. Prosim.
•
The building we lived in was owned by an older Russian guy who was in his fifties, maybe. He lived on the second floor, rented out the third and fourth floors to expats like us, and ran an audio studio on the first. That’s what it was called: Audio Studio, stenciled on the front door in English, Czech, and Russian. It consisted of two black pleather couches facing each other in the center of the room, surrounded on all sides by speakers: floorstanding, architectural, and sub/sat systems; source, processing, and amplifier components; two dimension; three dimension. Customers would sit on the couches, and my landlord would blast his favorite songs—think American ’80s pop like Bon Jovi and Peter Gabriel and Lionel Ritchie. Now think Bon Jovi and Peter Gabriel and Lionel Richie, all day, every day, over and over, through every possible kind of speaker. I had no idea there were so many—the bass and volume and reverb and vibration, the different qualities of sound.
Renting from him was a bit of a process. He spoke no English; we spoke no Russian. Our transactions were conducted through his daughter—a very lovely, very awkward teenager in ironed blue jeans and pristine white sneakers who was always reading magazines in the corner of the room, always plugged into an iPod, living in her own music, her own world. In the middle of the culture shock, everything so strange and new, this girl felt so gloriously familiar; not that long ago, I’d been in those same white shoes—fourteen, fifteen years old—waiting in my parents’ living room, waiting for my moment to run free.
When money needed to change hands, either from customers buying speakers or the renters living upstairs, she’d take off her headphones and conduct business in a complicated mix of Czech, Russian, English, and hand gestures, while her father sat on his couches playing “Purple Rain” or “Livin’ On a Prayer.” Over many months, this girl and I built our own language, yelling our heads off over the music and passing paperwork back and forth about the rent, the lease, the neighborhood. I remember loving her voice—all that youth and sweetness wrapped around the thick, heavy Slavic. It made me think of boxing—the delicacy of the footwork and the power of the punch.
I wish I could tell you more about her.
There are a lot of things I wish.
•
I didn’t know what they were fighting about. I didn’t know the language or the cultural norms of Eastern Europe. I didn’t know if they were Eastern European. I didn’t know where to buy a coconut. I didn’t know how to convert money. I didn’t know how simple it was to renew a VISA. I didn’t know the Czech equivalent of 9-1-1. I didn’t know what would happen if I called the police. If he was put in jail, what happened to her? Where would she go? In all the months of living there, I’d never seen a mother. I didn’t know if she had a mother. I didn’t know if she went to school. I didn’t know how old she was. I didn’t know a thing about her story, and I didn’t know if it was appropriate or acceptable or advisable to ask. I didn’t know if she was screaming in fear or fury or both. I didn’t know if I was the us or the them. I didn’t know how often I’d think of this moment, trying to fit it all together like a broken vase with superglue, and I didn’t know how many pieces were missing—blanks in my memory like a self-imposed force-quit.
•
I love Chicago. The pulse of this place is my heartbeat. I’m raising my child here. Every day, I’m grateful to zip in and out of its grid, and I work to give back as fully and completely as I’ve been given.
But Prague.
Prague is in my dreams; its streets are the streets I see when I shut my eyes. Every time I trip over something—and I’m stupidly clumsy, so it happens a lot—I can feel Prague in my body, its uneven jags of cobblestone under my feet. Those first several months of living there, so young and free and open, remain the best in my life. In Prague, I was writing. In Prague, I moved slowly, deliciously. In Prague, I was in love; the boyfriend and I got together a month before I left Chicago, and we decided he’d come with me, which was a little shocking but also the most exactly right thing. Remember when you first fell in love? You couldn’t be apart for more than an hour. You had to have sex all the time. You had to make elaborate dinners, drink tons of cheap wine, and stay up all night discovering every ridiculous detail about each other—“You like Philip Glass? I heard one of his songs one time fifteen years ago! Let’s make out!”—because everything is so perfectly, so breathtakingly new. One day, he came home from Tesco with a bottle of Mr. Proper, which is the same thing as the American Mr. Clean, the cleaning liquid. Same product, same packaging, same bald guy on the label. Why is that important? I have no idea, except when he told me, when he excitedly showed me the bottle—this vast and profound discovery—I thought he was so fascinating, so intelligent, so totally the one. Which he is; so much so that later I married him, but not because of some cleaning product. The cleaning product was part of that initial, magical, lovesick, half-sane haze. And to this day, if you show me a picture or film set in that city, if you quote a line of Hrabal or Macha or The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, or if you even mention the word Prague, I’m right back in the haze.
It’s been ten years, and still—snap your fingers—I’m right there.
“Are you enjoying your time in Prague?” our landlord’s daughter would ask, month after month, taking off her iPod to count our rent.
I didn’t know how to answer the question.
I didn’t have the language for it.
•
Maybe she wasn’t his daughter; that’s an assumption on my part. He is older and she is younger, and in the absence of factual information, my memory filled in the blank: Father/daughter. But what about the other possibilities? Employer/Assistant? Let’s run with that one. It’s nicer, and I’d rather think of nice things than not-so-nice things, things that you read in newspapers or see on Law & Order SVU. Like, maybe he bought her on the black market and forced her into prostitution; or maybe he kidnapped her and made her steal speakers and everything in the building is stolen, and the Czech-equivalent of the Feds will raid our apartment any day now; or maybe, maybe they’re lovers in a totally gross and unethical fifty-something guy/fifteen-year-old girl sort of a way; or maybe she’s not even fifteen—I’m assuming that, too—but if she was, there’s no way that shit was consensual—I don’t care what Lolita did or not do; Lolita is fiction, and this girl was real. She was real. She was screaming on the cobblestone four stories below me, and what should I have done? Called the police? What would I have said? Hi, nemluvim cesky, no, I don’t have a VISA, but something is happening. Can you sem si pospisit prosim, please?
•
When I first met Marketa, the woman who would become my closest Czech friend, she said, “There is an election soon in your country. Before we may be friends, I must know which you wil vote.”
“Kerry,” I told her. “I already sent an absentee ballot for Kerry.”
“Good,” she said. “Now we will do this thing.”
It was fall of 2004. The U
nited States government had recently asked the Czech Republic to pledge soldiers to Iraq. Anti-Bush graffiti was everywhere, the international media didn’t try to hide their disdain, and it never once occurred to me that he might actually win, which is probably why it hit me so hard when he did. After Kerry conceded the election, Marketa sent me an email that read: “Do not be sad, Megan. I will still be your friend. You are not one of them.”
I still have that email; it’s a plot-point on the line of my life. It brought to the forefront a tangled conversation about privilege that I’d been having with myself for years, forcing me to set aside everything I’d read, the stories I’d heard, the (what I thought had been) careful and critical listening about culture and nationality and race and difference and other, and take a terrifying look in mirror. You are not one of them. Aren’t I? Who is this all-elusive them? The bad them, of course, but is it really that easy? Good and bad, us and them, right and wrong.
Later that day, my then boyfriend/now husband came home from the Internet café to find me throwing coconuts out the window. At first, I’d wrapped them in plastic bags, hoping to save the milk to put in a gumbo, but after the second or third, I didn’t care. I wanted to break something. I wanted to get out of my own goddamn head. I wanted to find the right words.
“Are you enjoying your time in Prague?” our landlord’s daughter asked, taking off her iPod to count our rent.
I didn’t know how to answer the question.
I didn’t have the language for it.
•
It was the middle of the night, and I woke up to screaming. I was safe in my bed, safe in my secure job, rent paid, and had a healthy relationship with a kind, gentle man, which is a privilege I hadn’t always had, but I had it then and I’ve had it since. I remember getting out of bed and going to the window, opening it just enough to stick out my head. Four stories below, in front of our building, I saw my Russian landlord—huge and hairy and shirtless in pajama bottoms—and what I first thought was a grown woman in high, high heels. She was still screaming—had been screaming the whole time it took me to wake up, sit up, get out of bed, go to the window, open it, and lean out—and sure, fine, that doesn’t take much time. Ten seconds, max.
Imagine what can be done to a body in ten seconds.
Imagine what can be done to a heart.
Imagine what happened before I got to the window, before my eyes adjusted from the dark of the bedroom to the glare of the streetlamp below. They were cast in a nearly perfect spotlight, like a film set or a stage show. She was screaming, first wordlessly, then in Russian, and it was then that I recognized her voice—the delicacy and the power, the sweetness and the punch. I leaned out further and—underneath the more adult clothes, the jewelry, and the make-up—it was unmistakably her. I’d never seen her outside of the building; never seen her without those white,white sneakers; never imagined what her life was like. Did she have a boyfriend? A girlfriend? Maybe she wanted to be a translator, or a teacher, or a rock star. In my memory, she’s in school, she’s brilliant and funny and works her ass off, and within two years—three, tops—she’s out of the Audio Studio and running free, fast as she can away from that awful, awful night. Her heels put them at equal height, and they gripped each other’s shoulders. I couldn’t tell who was pushing or who was pulling; everything was fast and blurry and loud and louder and I didn’t know if she was screaming in fear or fury or both. I didn’t know if he was throwing her out or fighting to keep her there. I didn’t know who hit who first, but there was no mistaking the fact that he outweighed her three times over. The force of him knocked her off those impossibly high shoes, and there was nothing to catch her but the cobblestone. Her body was bent in impossible directions.
It happened so fast. It was dark. I didn’t understand what they were saying. I didn’t know the cultural norms of Eastern Europe. I didn’t know the Czech equivalent of 9-1-1. If I did call the police, what would I say? Hi, help, nemluvim cesky. Something is maybe happening, can you sem si pospisit prosim, please? And what would happen then? If he went to jail, what happened to her? She was just a girl! Wasn’t she? She was his daughter! Wasn’t she? In all the months of living there, I’d never considered her story, and of course it’s not appropriate or acceptable or advisable to ask, right? None of our business, right? Someone’s getting hurt below my window; or in the building next door; or on the L; or two neighborhoods over; or in some other city or country or community; and there will always, always, always be a reason to stay silent; always a seemingly good excuse to do nothing. I did nothing.
I did nothing.
•
The day we moved out, our landlord turned up the bass as high as it could go. I could feel the music vibrate in the walls of our building, up through the floor, and into my shoes. It was December now; we’d been there just under a year. All of our possessions fit into two mountain backpacks, and mine felt unexpectedly light as I went down those four flights of stairs.
Inside the Audio Studio, Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” was playing in surround sound. My landlord, per usual, was on the couch with a customer, and the daughter glanced up from her magazine when I came into the room. I don’t know what I’d expected. Maybe her arm would be in a sling? Maybe he’d be on crutches? Maybe they’d be wearing sunglasses to hide the bruises? Maybe she’d be long gone?
“Hi,” she said, taking off her headphones and standing up. She was so lovely. So awkward. So fourteen-years-old and almost free to run. “You are leaving Prague now?”
This is where, in my memory, I apologize, digging through our shared patchwork language to find the right words: I’m so sorry. I should have done better. I will do better. I tell her how, this time, I will rush down the four flights of stairs and put my body between theirs. This time, I will rush down the four flights of stairs—not in time to stop it, but still in time to help, to get her to a hospital, or a friend’s, or a shelter. This time, I will grab the lamp off my bedside table, a knife out of the kitchen, a bomb out of the bathroom, and I take aim, squinting one eye at the top of his skull, knocking him out from so many stories up. And this time, I will scream. I will be so fucking loud. I’ll wake the goddamn world.
THE RIGHT KIND OF WATER
THE FIRST HOUR IS GREAT. I’m in the bathtub, submerged to my neck. The water is warm and lovely, and I’m more relaxed than I’ve been in months. And the best part? What I’m doing here is work; it’s rewriting. It’s research.
While finishing up final edits on my story collection, I couldn’t shake this nagging feeling that one of them, “One One Thousand, Two One Thousand, Three,” wasn’t right. It was missing something. I read it over a thousand times and couldn’t pinpoint what bothered me, which is the fucking worst. If I can name the problem, I can fix it. I can go to my bookshelf, pull down the Garcia Marquez, the Tolstoy, Hubert Selby, James Baldwin, or Dorothy Allison, and figure out the literary gymnastics necessary to make the damn thing work.
Here’s the gist: a 13-year-old girl, Eliza, is skinny-dipping in a quarry in Southeast Michigan. She thinks she’s alone, but turns out there’s a group of high school guys nearby getting drunk in the woods. They discover her. Threaten her. Trap her in that quarry like a cage and demand she get up so they can look at her. Like a lot of fiction—mine, at least—this is based on some semblance of a true experience, and what interested me the most as I wrote it was the tension. Would she stand or wouldn’t she? How would they react when she did or didn’t? How would she react to their reaction?
I teach creative writing classes, and what finally cracked the issue was a discussion my students and I had around a scene from Don DeGrazia’s American Skin. Alex, the main character, boards the L, all hell breaks loose, and then he gets off.
“How much times passes between the on and off?” asked one of my students. “Like five minutes? How does the reader see those minutes passing?”
And all of a sudden, I knew. In “One One Thousand…,” the st
ory starts when Eliza gets in the water and ends when she gets out. But how much time passes between the two? I didn’t know. Later, rereading the story, I saw certain clues I’d placed unconsciously: at the beginning, the sun is high, warming the water; by the end, it’s freezing and the stars are out. So that’s—what? 3 p.m. to 8 p.m.? Five hours? That’s a lot of time for somebody to be naked in the water. What happens to a body when it’s submerged for that long?
This is the point where, historically, I hit the library. I’m the stay up all night/drink too much coffee kinda girl, finding esoteric details in random books. Even now, with the Internet, I still stalk libraries, milking electronic reserves for all their worth.
But—
I’d recently published a story set in a greenhouse. I wrote about that greenhouse from memory—blah, blah, plants and trees—adding in fancy sounding names pulled from the 25th anniversary edition of The Book of Plants. And then, not long after, I stopped by the Gethsemane Garden Center and realized my description had been totally, completely, utterly wrong. I’d forgotten the tropical temperature; the hoses full of pinpricks, spraying everything with a fine, hot mist; the ceiling of green, like a jungle. I knew then that I needed to up my research game. If I could go there, I’d go. If I could do it, I’d do it. If I could live it, I’d live it.
So.
With no quarries in the immediate vicinity of Chicago, and the late-fall chill already here, I decided on the bathtub. I would sit in the bathtub. For five hours. iPhone alarm set to count down the minutes, journal on the nearby toilet to take notes about my skin, my fingertips, my toes, my teeth (chattering?). I had very vague, very naïve, very uninformed ideas of what would happen, and a silly sense of pride in what I was doing.
Once I Was Cool Page 6
