by Nell Zink
She wondered if it was too late to start over. She placed herself squarely in front of the full-length mirror on Karen’s closet door and took stock.
Her face hadn’t changed much. Her hair was almost the same. Her feet weren’t any different. Her hands had aged. And that was all she could see of herself. The rest was covered by a rugby shirt and carpenter’s pants.
Grimacing, she took off the shirt and looked at the mirror again. The baggy pants looked ridiculous with her upper body, like a jug holding a calla lily, so she took them off, too. Her dingy bra and underwear were also unflattering and she took them off. Clad only in her own soft hair, she remembered the day she had danced with her beautiful debutante gown. All her naive joy about showing the world her long neck, straight shoulders, and weensy waistline.
The body parts were still there, but she wanted the dress back.
You idiot, Meg thought. You’re a femme!
She rifled through Karen’s things and found a disposable razor to shave her legs. Her own smooth legs drove her wild with lust.
The next morning she drove to Broad Street in Richmond and spent three hundred dollars at Thalheimers. She didn’t care who saw her. After she put on the first outfit and shoes she bought, she couldn’t even recognize herself.
She let a salesgirl do her face, but she didn’t buy any makeup. One step at a time.
The Saturday after that, buying milk at the bait shop while wearing a close-fitting knit dress with tights, almost as an experiment, she saw a slightly younger woman climb out of a black Fiero. The woman had low-slung jeans on, with a big silver belt buckle, and her hair was cut to expose her ears. To Meg she seemed a pretty person done up tough, like a puppy with a spiked collar. Her hair and eyes were black and her skin was tan, with red lipstick like Malibu Snow White.
Meg lingered at the cash register and said, “You’re not from around here.”
“I’m looking for a house,” the woman said as she paid for a six of Molson.
“I know one for sale that I could show you.” It was true. Karen’s ten-dollar pediatrician and his wife were liberals who had despaired of meeting like-minded couples and were looking to move away. The only thing still tying them to their five-acre farmette was the hundreds of yards of antenna wire strung from the trees. The pediatrician was a ham radio operator.
“I only need a year lease.”
“They would do that. If they rent and hold, they’ll get a better price. Property values around here go up and up.”
“Are you a Realtor?”
“No!” Meg looked down. “I’m a . . .” She paused, unable to think of a job title that would justify her nice outfit. “Housewife!” she said finally. She could be one of those Ladies Who Lunch.
She got in the strange woman’s car and after a twenty-minute ride zigzagging on numbered country roads, naming the unmarked crossings, showed her the sign, FOR SALE BY OWNER.
“Let’s drive up and see it,” the woman said.
“But don’t get out of the car,” Meg said. “They have dogs.”
The woman rolled the car slowly up the last bit of driveway and said, “Wow, this place is really country.” The pediatrician’s house was new. It stood on a high concrete foundation and had blue vinyl siding and small windows. It looked like a plastic toy. The wires connecting bare treetop to bare treetop were hard to miss. The trees were black walnuts that had grown in the woods and been left standing, scarred by the bulldozer they’d used to grade the clearing. The pediatrician’s wife’s chickens had scratched half the yard bare.
“And you were expecting?”
“Well, Realtors are always showing me places that are beautiful and historic and, I don’t know, kind of totally gay. You know what I’m saying?”
“You mean those Victorian gingerbread houses you can turn into a bed and breakfast, and old general stores with porch swings.”
“You got it. This house is reality.”
“Humankind cannot bear much reality,” Meg said.
“T. S. Eliot,” the woman said. “This house might be a little too much reality.” She swung the car around and drove back to the road.
“You into poetry?”
“Not exactly. I teach women’s studies at CUNY, but I’m on sabbatical next year with a gig at Hampton U because Howard was booked solid, but maybe it’s better to get south of DC. You know DC is a world all its own. I’m trying to write a book about this black lesbian playwright nobody ever heard of, and the thing is, maybe I know her work up and down and inside and out, but I cannot tell you what’s drawn from life. Empiricism is a huge big deal right now. Authenticity. Reality. So I decided to do a sabbatical abroad. Spend some time at a historically black school, learn the words, the rhythms. Know what I mean? You hear poets read, but if that’s all you hear, you’re not hearing them. You have to hear them talk. At Hampton I’m in the theater department.”
As she shifted into fourth the woman turned her head and smiled. She added a trace of condescension and sympathy, softening her smile around the edges, when she saw that Meg had not understood a word she said. Meg was staring blankly as a veal calf tied out in a field.
“I don’t get this state at all,” the woman said, changing the subject. “It’s a strange world down here, economically. All that stuff you read about sharecroppers and tenant farmers doesn’t seem to fit. It’s rent-to-own shops, and people selling the same real estate over and over for a balloon payment due in two years. Poverty, poverty, everywhere you look, but no check-cashing places. You can’t throw a rock without hitting a bank! I just don’t get Virginia. I wish somebody would just explain it to me—”
“Enough,” Meg said, shaking her head. She looked at her knees and wriggled in the bucket seat so she could straighten her skirt. “Just stop. I can’t take it. If you don’t let me out of this car, I’m going to go crazy, and I don’t even know your name.”
The light dawned. The woman downshifted and pulled over to the side of the road. Meg jumped out and across the ditch into a soybean field. There was nowhere for her to hide. She just stood there cowering while the woman bore down on her with purposeful strides. “I’m going to fuck you now,” she informed Meg, simultaneously kissing her and pushing her to the ground between two rows of soybeans in a sort of combination tango step and wrestling move.
“Aaanh!” Meg wailed in response.
“What was that?” The woman drew back.
“Please don’t mind me. That was just my life flashing before my eyes.”
“One more time. I need to fuck you.” Meg dissolved in a flash of white light. It was like the sex scenes in Cosmopolitan. “That’s better,” the woman said.
She introduced herself as Luke, short for Loredana De Luca. She was able to free Meg from her writer’s block with one well-placed observation. “You’re such a separatist when you write,” she said. “If you would just put your lesbians out in society, you’d have your dramatic conflicts. You’d even have roles for men!” Audiences, she added, love watching women, but actors hate being sidelined. That’s why all the great female roles predate actresses. Antigone was a guy in a mask. Portia was a guy in a dress. So don’t sideline your actors.
Meg’s next draft was about lesbians in Iran. It had only two female roles, but very good ones, with a stoning and a suicide. Luke sent copies to friends in New York. The scene in which they take off their chadors to reveal rugby shirts was compared with the nude scene in Equus. People wanted to produce it and give Meg money. Her life had finally begun.
The lovebirds spent a lot of time at the squirrel sanctuary, as their lifestyle was incompatible with family values in Centerville. The horizontal light making the maples glow flame orange, the deep blue water dappled with the shadows of fish. Lying entwined in a rowboat, letting the wind push them into reeds, hearing the call of migrating curlews. Because she had to teach, Luke couldn’t be on the Eastern Shore all the time. But she was a fast driver.
Meg wrote to Karen saying she would be staying
on the Eastern Shore as much as she could, but would be back to pick them up at Thanksgiving. Dee was handling fall break.
Karen wrote to her mother at least once a week, usually on Sunday mornings, but more often if something interesting happened. The squirrel sanctuary’s address was general delivery, so her letters went to the little post office in the nearest town and waited there to be picked up. Meg always sat down at the lunch counter at the five-and-dime across the street and wrote a reply right away, to save extra trips.
That was the sum total of their communication. It was not very communicative. Karen did not write that Temple was struggling to keep up with his course work, and Meg did not write that she was in love.
Nine
Parties at The University were considered a chance to blow off steam. To be three sheets to the wind and not show it: That was the ideal, attainable only by the most accomplished teen alcoholics. Visibly drunk: undesirable. Sober: geekdom (undesirable). Enter Temple and Karen.
It was Halloween, their first away from home. They had never seen middle-class trick-or-treaters in a town with houses. Charlottesville featured elaborate jack-o’-lanterns with real candles inside and wreaths of autumn leaves on doors. Halloween was aromatic and beautiful, and obviously as big a deal as Christmas. They were excited.
They surmised that in wild, uninhibited C’ville anything goes. Yet the costumes they chose were in doubtful taste by any standards. Temple wore a three-dollar thrift-shop suit of beige polyester gabardine from the seventies with wide lapels and no shirt. On his bare, hairless chest, Karen painted a large swastika in Wite-Out. Her costume was more or less the same, except that she wore her blue interview suit, while her swastika was in black Magic Marker on a T-shirt. On her feet were ratty gray Keds, her only shoes. There was a hole in the toe, but only on one side. Thus clad, they tasted a variety of miniaturized sweet cocktails at a progressive drinking party in Karen’s freshman dorm, telling anyone who asked that they were dressed as crypto-fascism.
It was Temple’s idea. It didn’t particularly make sense. But after eight weeks of self-imposed boot camp, he wasn’t expecting anyone ever again to notice anything he did. It was theater of the absurd, and its target audience was Karen. She was excessively amused. They collected stares and no comments of any kind, trawling the town and then the grounds for candy. At Temple’s request, they switched from saying “Trick or treat!” to singing “Here We Go a-Wassailing.”
Eventually they reached a brick mansion with a wraparound porch where there was clearly a party going on. They rang the doorbell. They swung their candy sacks from side to side in rhythm and started singing the song. A boy answered the door dressed as a wizard in a pointed hat and a long cape covered with stars. He gave them each a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup and said, “So what are you? I mean, you’re obviously assimilationist self-hatred, like W. E. B. Du Bois, but what’s she?”
“She’s my shadow,” Temple said. It didn’t quite make sense, but Temple was not accustomed to having logical rigor enforced by anyone other than his conscience, and it had dozed off from exhaustion.
“Say, you guys want to come inside before somebody shoots you?”
The wizard opened the door on a room that was relatively quiet, relatively bright, and not the least bit smoky. There were many boys, and a few girls, sitting in costumes on sofas arranged in squares. Three boys were playing a complicated board game while others looked on and commented. A handsome boy stood in a corner of the huge room by the fireplace, one foot up on the hearth, playing a Violent Femmes song on a baritone ukulele.
“We’ll come inside for a little while,” Karen said.
She and Temple set their candy bags down in an armchair to reserve it and went looking for the bathroom. They worked their way toward the back of the house all the way to the kitchen but didn’t find it. They climbed the stairs to the second floor and found only bedrooms. They stood in the hallway looking confused, which is easy to do alone at a big party wearing swastikas, and were discovered there by the musician, who had come upstairs to put his ukulele away. It was Byrdie Fleming.
“What are you looking for?”
“The bathroom,” Karen said.
“You can go in my suite,” Byrdie said. “The bathrooms are all between bedrooms. You can’t get to them from the hallway.” He led them down the hall and opened a door. There were about ten people in the room, an odd smell Temple and Karen didn’t recognize, and on the coffee table a black brick of compressed Afghan hashish that had seen better days. A girl was prying shavings off it with a cake knife.
While Karen went to the bathroom, Temple sat down. The discussion in the room revolved around Friedrich Nietzsche. “He was a radical feminist,” a girl said. “That’s proof positive that something is wrong with radical feminism. He’s just like them. He thought women need to be radically different from the way they are.”
“He thought everybody needed to change radically,” Byrdie said. “Except him. So calling him a feminist because he hates women is like calling him a leftist because he hates the working class.” He turned to Temple and said, “You’re obviously a fascist. You explain it to them!”
“I just want everything to stay the way it is and then repeat itself,” Temple said. “I call it eternal recurrence. Then there’s no way out for any of us.”
“That’s exactly right,” Byrdie said. “You can’t claim you have some kind of critical outsider perspective just because you hate the situation you’re in.”
“There’s a way out if you call Cthulhu,” another boy said. “Cthulhu destroys your world, and then you can start over.”
“Which parts of this are my world?” Temple asked. “I’d hate to have Cthulhu destroy my world and then it turns out nothing’s changed except the parts that were mine. So I’m still sitting here talking to you, but, like, where’s my pants?” He looked down.
“What about your friend? She must be from your world. We never saw her before.”
“Me and Shadow don’t live in the same world,” Temple said. Then he looked embarrassed. “I mean, nobody shares a world. We all have our own worlds.”
“Worldviews,” Byrdie said. “I mean, it’s one world, but people have different perspectives on it. Otherwise I couldn’t change your world, and you couldn’t change mine. There’s advantages and disadvantages.”
Karen came out of the bathroom, occasioning a brief hush because you don’t see an outfit like that every day. Byrdie said, “Would you like a drink?”
“Maybe a beer,” Karen said. “I don’t really drink.”
“But by the way, I’ve been wanting to ask you,” Temple said. “Is that opium, or hashish?”
“It’s hash,” the Lovecraftian boy volunteered. “We burned through all our reefer this morning at the ounce blitz.”
“I’ve been fascinated by the topic of hashish ever since I read a certain masterpiece of black literature, The Count of Monte Cristo. And that was before I got turned on to Baudelaire.”
“My mom’s heavy into Baudelaire,” Karen explained, seeming embarrassed by Temple but not by her own mention of her mom.
“So I was just wondering, is it the kind you can eat?” Temple asked. “Because I don’t smoke. I mean, I tried smoking once, but I ended up coughing like crazy.”
“We were going to make brownies,” the girl with the cake knife said. “But we’re not getting very far. It’s hard as a rock.”
“Let me try,” Temple said. He accepted the knife and proved to be much stronger than the girl, able to cut slices from the block of hashish as though it were a fruitcake.
“Slow down!” the girl said. “You’re going to get us all fucked up. That is a lot of hash.”
“Is it? I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
“This is plenty for brownies,” she said. “You want to hang out and help eat them?”
“Oh, Temple!” Karen cried. “Don’t you dare!”
“Just one little taste?” he asked her. “For Baudelaire’s sak
e?”
The whole room laughed.
“We don’t do illegal drugs,” Karen said. “Don’t you have, like, alcohol or anything normal?”
“This is the drug frat,” a boy explained. “Didn’t you see the sign?”
“There’s no sign,” the girl said, in an aside to Karen. “They lost their charter.”
“I didn’t want to join a fraternity anyway,” Temple said. “I was going to join a liberty first, and then an equality.”
“There’s punch downstairs,” Byrdie said to Karen.
“I’ll get you some punch,” Karen said to Temple.
Byrdie accompanied her down the stairs, admiring the deft way her sneakers skidded down the slick carpet below her short skirt. He thought: I know this girl. But how? He put the question out of his mind and led her to the back porch, where a plastic garbage can stood filled to the brim with rum punch nearly invisible under rafts of floating strawberries that had been soaked overnight in grain alcohol. He dipped out two generous servings and watched her walk back upstairs.
About seven hours later, Byrdie thought to reascend the steps to his room. Temple was on his sofa. Something smelled bad, like bathroom. He looked closer. Temple had puked and soiled his pants. He tried to rouse him and got only groans. The others were gone.
But where? That motherly little girl wouldn’t have left Temple alone. The lowborn damsel who unleashed all the protective urges in Byrdie. He walked the length of his hall and then the length of the halls upstairs, and heard nothing. Then he walked the halls again, opening every door.
Finally he found people awake and switched on the light. Karen lay on her back on a bed that had been shoved into the middle of the room, at the center of a group of boys wearing only boxer shorts. They had swastikas drawn on their chests in Magic Marker. There was a smell of incense and sweat.
“What the fuck are you doing,” Byrdie said. “I mean, what the fuck are you doing?”
