Inside

by Alix Ohlin

  Anne stopped bringing men home, a little hiatus that was nice at first, giving her a feeling of astringent purity and asceticism. But she soon decided that if she could trust Hilary in the apartment during the day, then she could trust her there at night. So when she wanted to be with a man or felt it would be helpful to her career—a choice she made pragmatically, having never been foolish about sex—she went to his place instead. This eliminated married men from the realm of possibility, which was probably a good thing anyway. And she could control when the evening ended, just by leaving.

  One night, she walked home along St. Mark’s Place through the throngs of kids who flocked to the city to buy T-shirts and records and festoon themselves with nose rings and tattoos. Two teenagers, blond Rastas, with a mangy, half-starved golden retriever on a leash, sat on a Mexican blanket on the sidewalk like they were having a picnic. Anne made the mistake of looking the thin, dirty girl in the eye. She was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, her fingernails painted green, and though her hair was greasy, her teeth were pearly and perfect; Anne guessed she hadn’t been gone from home for long. Somewhere people were looking for her, wondering why she’d left and where she’d gone.

  “Hey,” the thin girl said, “can you give us some change? Please?”

  Anne shook her head.

  “Our dog’s really hungry.”

  Anne kept walking as the girl kept talking, her voice rising to an angry squawk.

  “What about a dollar?” she said. “What about fifty fucking cents?”

  Anne didn’t look back. You couldn’t help everybody.

  “I’m glad I don’t have a sister,” Hilary said.

  She and Anne were sitting on the couch on a Thursday night, eating spaghetti and watching reality TV. Their latest routine, whenever Anne wasn’t rehearsing, was to have dinner together in the living room. Hilary herself had provided the television, which she claimed to have found on the street. After a month in the apartment, she was cleaner, calmer, and fatter. Anne sometimes thought of her as the cow, but not pejoratively; it had to do with the girl’s quietness, her large brown eyes, her shifting, bovine way of settling herself on the couch.

  They were watching a show in which two sisters exchanged lives, each one now having to deal with the other’s annoying husband and children, thus learning to appreciate her own annoying husband and children.

  “I have a brother,” Hilary said. “He’s twelve. He likes video games. I send him postcards sometimes.”

  It might have been the longest Anne had ever heard her speak. “What’s his name?”

  “Joshua.”

  “Not Josh?”

  Hilary shook her head. “We always use his full name. My parents are real religious. I’m from the country—well, not the country, exactly, just a small town. We live right in town, but there’s not much town there. Joshua wants to leave too. I write him postcards, like I said, but I don’t send them from here. I give them to people in the train station and ask them to mail them from wherever they’re going. That way nobody knows where I am.”

  “You give them to strangers at the train station?”

  “Older women, ones that are alone. They’re the nicest. I just say that I couldn’t find a mailbox, and would they mind dropping this postcard in the mail whenever they have time? They always say yes and don’t ask any questions.”

  “You’re good at figuring people out,” Anne said.

  The girl gave her a measured look. “Yeah, I guess I am.”

  Through these casual Thursday-night disclosures, Anne learned that Hilary liked bananas and was allergic to coconut. That there wasn’t anything for her and her hometown friends to do at night except go to Walmart. That her father was dead and she’d grown up with her mother and stepfather, and that Joshua was actually her stepbrother. But beyond these random, basic facts, she didn’t share much. No sentence ever blossomed into anecdote, and she showed so little emotion, positive or negative, that Anne started to wonder if she was repressing some intense trauma. If she were a movie character, this would eventually burst loose in a flood of bad behavior. But life was longer than movies and a person never knew when the flood would finally come, or sometimes even how to recognize it when it did.

  As they spent more time together, Anne began to feel not like a mother—because she thought of mothers as old and asexual—but like an older sister. It made her sad that Hilary was all alone in the world. She was alone too, but that was different; she was twenty-two, attractive, an actress in New York. A runaway who slept in doorways was vulnerable, pathetic. She brooded about Hilary’s weight, burgeoning day by day. Somewhere she had found a shapeless, navy-blue sweatsuit; she wore it constantly, and it made her look like an aging football player gone to fat. Anne didn’t buy her any more donuts, and stocked the fridge with fruit and vegetables. When she got home at night, she often made a salad and forced Hilary to eat it. Not that there was much forcing involved; she only had to say, “Here,” and the girl would eat whatever was put in front of her.

  Sometimes, after dinner, Anne would suggest going for a walk, and they’d put on their coats and window-shop around the East Village for an hour or two. They’d stop at Café Mogador for a cup of tea, eavesdropping on people flirting or breaking up or arguing about the war, then resume their walk. None of this activity seemed to take any of the weight off, though.

  Anne also started thinking about the girl’s future, wondering about school, or jobs, or friends. She didn’t put much trust in convention, but she did believe in self-actualization—a word she had picked up from other actors. For her it meant that you alone decided what your true self should be. But Hilary never mentioned wanting to do anything or be anything. She never read a book, listened to music, or even talked about dreams. She seemed to live in an eternal present, never worrying about what came next.

  In the middle of March, Anne was cast in a great part in a new play. She wasn’t the leading lady but the catalyst, the unhinged and sexualized stranger whose energy makes all the normal people disintegrate. “You’re so perfect for this I want to die,” the director said. Everything he loved made him want to die. But when she read the script, she knew exactly how he felt. She wanted to die too, preferably onstage.

  It was a long play, with commensurately long rehearsals in Long Island City that started almost immediately. So Anne was suddenly home a lot less. When she returned late at night, she sometimes saw no more of Hilary than her blanketed, sleeping form on the couch.

  Another thing: there was a man, a member of the crew and a friend of the director’s, a soft-spoken, scruffy carpenter. He was earnest and cute, with dark eyes and a surprisingly white, toothy smile. She often went home with him after rehearsals, and when she came back to her apartment after a day or two away it almost felt like she was entering a stranger’s home, where she was now the guest.

  One weekend, the director got food poisoning and canceled the rehearsals. Anne had fallen so in love with her character, and the extra dimension it gave her own personality, that she felt almost jilted. Grumpily, she decided to spend the empty days catching up on the few basic tasks of her streamlined life: laundry, bills, nails. On Saturday morning Hilary wasn’t at home, and Anne wondered if she had followed her advice and found some kind of job. Anne came and went throughout the day, and when the girl still hadn’t reappeared she was unaccountably freaked out. She’d held a certain image of the apartment in her mind all those days and nights when she’d been gone, with Hilary there and the apartment somehow tended, waiting for her to come back. Realizing now that she had no idea of Hilary’s movements or whereabouts made her feel strangely unmoored.

  Once her laundry was finished, she went to the bodega for milk. She was pulling a carton out of the fridge when she heard a familiar voice say, “I’m dying for some ice cream.”

  Hilary was standing on the other side of the store, her blond braids snaking down her shoulder blades. There was a crowded aisle between them, and the girl had no idea she was there. Anne
couldn’t see the guy she was talking to—a stack of cereal and toilet paper was blocking her view—but she heard him say, “You always want ice cream. You’re, like, obsessed with ice cream.”

  “I’m not obsessed.”

  “Are too.”

  “Am not. Which do you want? I want chocolate chunk, cookie dough, or cherry cheesecake.”

  “Three flavors, but you’re not obsessed?”

  “Shut up!”

  Hilary’s tone was gauzy and flirty, lithe with laughter. It sounded like a voice that belonged to a girl who moved quickly, showed some skin, fell in love. Not like the Hilary Anne knew at all.

  She took a step closer, peering through the dry goods while staying hidden. The guy looked even younger than Hilary and was very thin, with pocked skin that contrasted sharply with his full, dark lips. His hair was sculpted into a miniature Mohawk, and his eyebrow and nose were pierced. His red hoodie was slipping off his slouched shoulders, and his jeans were sliding off his hips. There was barely enough of him to hang clothes on. She could crush him, Anne thought. He didn’t look like much, but neither did Hilary, in her shapeless blue sweatsuit. In this, they were a matched pair.

  They finally settled on chocolate, and Anne followed them, leaving her own purchase behind, back to the apartment. She waited five minutes, then went inside.

  Hilary glanced up, her expression blinkered, unrepentant. “This is Alan,” she said.

  “Hey,” he said.

  Anne said nothing, just sat down on the couch and watched them. She hoped this would make them so uncomfortable that the guy would leave, but it didn’t seem to. They stood at the counter eating ice cream and teasing each other, and Anne’s presence didn’t even seem to have registered. Their dialogue was like the worst play she’d ever seen.

  “You’re a messy eater.”

  “I am not.”

  “You have chocolate on your chin.”

  “So do you.”

  “Where?”

  “Right there.”

  And so on and so on. She was the audience, which she hated being. After a while she went into the bedroom and closed the door, her emotions feeding on themselves: she was upset because she was mad, and that made her even angrier. She took deep breaths and counted to a hundred, then left the apartment without a word and spent two hours at yoga. They were gone when she got back, their bowls washed and drying by the sink.

  Even by herself, her apartment felt different, the air contaminated by someone else’s sexual energies, someone else’s flirt. What was happening?

  She slept uneasily that night, waiting for Hilary to come back. Somehow she missed her reentry, but when she woke up at three in the morning, they were both in the living room—Hilary on the couch, Alan on the floor. He was sleeping on a pad made of blankets they must have scavenged, and his pillow was a bundled square of clothes.

  She stood in the doorway watching them. The shadows were tinted blue from a neon sign across the street. Hilary turned over on the couch, her movements slow, labored, her body huge. She opened her eyes and looked right at Anne with no expression at all. Vacancy didn’t begin to describe it. Standing there in her tank top and pajama pants, the hair rising on her arms, Anne felt sticklike, insubstantial, and for the first time she could remember she wished she were bigger, stronger, heavier. Now she felt like the one who could be crushed. Without saying anything, Hilary closed her eyes and seemed to fall back asleep.

  What would you say to the police? There’s someone in my apartment—no, it wasn’t a break-in, more of a slow slide-in. Or, I’m under attack by a fat teenage girl and her pimple-faced boyfriend? What was the crime here, exactly? She stewed over these questions in the night, cooked them to an angry boil. She decided that in the morning she’d tell Hilary the boy had to go, or else she’d call the police. A runaway is a runaway. Maybe Hilary’s face was on a milk carton somewhere. Maybe her parents would be thankful.

  In the morning, in fact, the boy was gone. Anne made coffee and waited for Hilary to wake up, wondering what she was going to say. They had no language, the two of them, for the kind of conversation she needed to have. They’d never exchanged any confidences, romantic or otherwise, and it was too late now to establish that kind of base. She couldn’t ask Hilary who the boy was, because she’d never asked who Hilary was.

  When Hilary finally woke up and saw Anne watching her, she didn’t look startled. Even in her sleep she seemed to have been preparing for the confrontation. Her languid cow’s eyes were ready. “Listen,” she said, “thanks for letting us stay.”

  “Us?” Anne said.

  “Me and Alan. We were desperate before. You’re really saving our asses.”

  “I didn’t realize I was saving both your asses.”

  “Yeah, well, for a while Alan was up in Syracuse working construction. But now he’s back.”

  For the life of her, Anne couldn’t picture that scrawny punk lifting a hammer or a two-by-four. Surely he’d snag the tools on his eyebrow rings. As these thoughts piled up, she realized she had become just like her mother, and she could also blame Hilary for putting her on the wrong side of a generational divide. “You can’t both stay here,” she said.

  Hilary nodded as if she’d been expecting this. “Okay, I figured. But can we stay until the baby comes?”

  Until the baby comes. Anne had to repeat the words in her mind several times before they made any sense. “Jesus,” she said. “You’re pregnant.”

  The looks passing across Hilary’s face—understanding, disgust, slight amusement—were subtle, brief, and controlled. “I’m not due for three months,” she said. “Alan’s going to get us a place by then. He knows some people squatting in Jersey City.”

  Anne couldn’t think of what to say, despite knowing that her silence would be taken for acquiescence. She felt like an idiot.

  “Don’t worry,” Hilary added kindly, as if to a child. “It’ll be okay.”

  For the first time in ages, Anne didn’t know what to do; she wished she had a friend to ask for advice. She’d left home when she wasn’t much older than Hilary, and since then had kept herself aloof, especially from women, who tended to dive into confidences as if they were salvation. Being alone and being aloof were the same as being superior. But maybe this wasn’t the best system.

  Out of respect or, more likely, a calculated desire not to provoke her, Alan didn’t return that morning. After breakfast, Anne said, “Let’s go for a walk,” and Hilary nodded.

  They headed toward Tompkins Square Park, the spring wind lashing their faces, and Anne pulled her hat down over her ears. Despite the cool weather, all around the park people were having brunch, shopping, walking dogs. The girls wore frayed cords, the boys plaid shirts. From an open window came the smell of pot. In the park kids were playing kickball, and under an enormous elm tree Hare Krishnas were chanting and singing.

  Hilary walked along beside her, matching her stride like a dog on a leash.

  Now that Anne recognized the girl’s bulk for what it was, her every bodily sign seemed to broadcast pregnancy: hands resting on her stomach, her cheeks even broader, her calm eyes hoarding all internal energy. Things Anne hadn’t even realized were confusing suddenly made sense, which maddened and embarrassed her because actresses were supposed to be observant. So as they walked she asked Hilary every question she could think of. Where was she from, exactly? Why had she left home? Did her parents know where she was? Did they know she was pregnant? Was Alan from her hometown? When exactly was the baby due? How long had she been living on the street before ending up downstairs? What were her plans?

  Unruffled, undefensive, Hilary answered each question in turn. She was from a small town between Binghamton and Syracuse. Her mother worked in a grocery store. Her stepfather had sexually abused her and she had run away twice before. She went back because of Alan, who’d promised to protect her, and did. They’d come down to the city just before Christmas and stayed with Alan’s cousin in Brooklyn, where he had a one-bed
room apartment with two roommates, but he’d kicked them out after they had a fight. Then she found an NYU ID and key card on the street and managed to get inside a dorm, where she set up a bed in an unused storage room and passed through the hallways without any trouble, everybody assuming she was a student. Once she was settled, Alan went up to Syracuse to make some money so that when the baby came they’d be ready with an apartment and “stuff like that.” From that melting phrase Anne could tell Hilary was both sentimental about the baby and clueless about what it would involve. During Alan’s absence, Hilary got evicted from the room and had to stay out of shelters, because the security guard was probably calling out a description and “with that Amber alert and everything, it was such a drag,” which is why she’d ended up downstairs. She was sick and tired and just needed to, you know, lie down inside and be warm for a few days. By the time Alan got back she was at Anne’s.

  “I told him I’d be all right, and I was,” she finished. “I can take care of myself, but he worries a lot about me.”

  “You should’ve told me,” Anne said.

  “About what?”

  “Everything.”

  The girl stared at her. “You didn’t ask,” she pointed out.

  “Didn’t ask what? ‘Oh, by the way, are you pregnant?’ ‘Oh, are you on the lam from the police?’ ‘Oh, will some snotty punk kid show up in my kitchen one day?’ ”

  The Hare Krishnas turned around at the sound of Anne’s raised voice, and she glared at them until they went back to their routine.

  Hilary shook her head angrily. “Alan’s not snotty. Look, we’re both real clean. We don’t make a mess. I keep the place okay, right? I know you’ve done a lot. You didn’t have to let me stay. But, I swear, eventually we’ll have a place and money and stuff, and I’ll pay you back, whatever you want.” For the first time, she sounded like a teenager. And once again, she had the knack of saying the right thing at the right time. “Anyway, Anne? Aren’t you a runaway too?”