Lullaby for the Rain Girl

by Christopher Conlon

“Don’t leave me, Ben,” she said. “Please don’t leave me.”

  # # #

  Yet for all of Sherry’s insecurities, and all of Rachel’s obliviousness, we got along, at least for a while. We became a kind of foursome, considerably more than just roommates: soon enough we combined the shopping and the cooking, both couples contributing roughly equally (though for their part, Peter did most of the work; Rachel never shopped, and rarely did anything more to prepare food than chopping a few carrots while smoking incessantly). We managed the limited bathroom facilities well enough, especially in the mornings, when it quickly became apparent that each couple should be allotted a certain amount of time there together rather than apart, for efficiency’s sake.

  Peter and I hung out together sometimes, drinking beer and talking about this and that. Even Sherry and Rachel went downtown together a couple of times, though those efforts didn’t last long on Sherry’s part. (“Does she have to be rude to everybody?” I remember Sherry asking me.) On nights that Peter and Rachel weren’t gone to rehearsals, and I wasn’t totally buried in schoolwork (and my burden had lifted a bit: the financial easing had allowed me to quit the cafeteria job at school), we sometimes just lazed around the apartment together, playing music, watching videos on a new cable channel called MTV—Peter had set up his television in the main room, along with a shiny new top-loading VCR. In this era video rental stores didn’t yet exist, but the Wherehouse record stores rented a few movies on tape, along with Fotomat. Two of us would be deputized to head down to some such place and pick up a couple of movies while the other two stayed and waited for our pizza to be delivered.

  It was fun, really, and quite different from anything Sherry or I had expected. The difference came entirely from Peter—naturally gregarious, affable, and likeable, he was our team leader, our guiding spirit. He had a quality I later realized was admirable, and rare: he accepted people as they were, and was truly interested in them. “So tell me about your writing,” he might say to me, and what he was looking for was no two-sentence summary answer: he really wanted to know. He asked to read some, and I gave him two or three of my best stories; he returned them a day or two later with annotations covering them, all quite helpful and insightful, and we talked about my work for an hour or more. He was a wonderful audience, more directly and supportively critical than Sherry, who generally deferred to me and said it was all great.

  He spent time with Sherry, too, and with the two of us together. Once in the living room Sherry said, “You guys are so directed. Ben’s got his writing. Peter, you’ve got your CPA stuff. Even Rachel’s got her singing. But I just don’t have—a direction, you know?”

  “Well,” Peter said, “what do you want to do?”

  “That’s just it,” she said glumly. “I don’t know. I like books. I like music. But I’m not talented. I can’t do those things. I just feel like—like I’m going to be stuck forever as a clerk somewhere.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly. You’ll figure things out. You’ll choose a major and that will give you some direction.”

  “Even that’s hard,” she said. “What do I major in? English? I don’t want to be an English teacher, but what else do you do with that degree? Business? I’m not like you, Peter. I don’t have a head for things like that.” She leaned against me on the sofa, and uncharacteristically took my cigarette from my hands, puffing on it quickly and then placing it back between my fingers. “You guys are together. I’m not.”

  “I’m not as together as you think,” Peter said. He was certainly correct about that, though just how correct I wouldn’t know for some time yet.

  “Still. You’ve got a sense of direction. I’m just—wandering in the fog.”

  “Why don’t you just live?” Peter said, leaning forward and looking at her intently. “I mean, who says you have to ‘do’ anything? You like that bookstore where you work, don’t you? You said you do.”

  “I do,” she admitted, playing with her hair. “But it’s not like I want to be a clerk in a bookstore my whole life.”

  “Who said your whole life?” Peter said urgently. “Why do people always think like that? Just because you’re doing it now doesn’t mean you’ll do it your whole life. You’re in college. You’re doing well. Things will fall into place for you.”

  She smiled at him. “You make it sound like they will.”

  He leaned back again. “You’re too smart to fail,” he said. “Just give yourself time. Jesus, what are you, nineteen, right? You’re a baby still.”

  She chuckled. “And you’re all of twenty-two.”

  “Hey,” he laughed, “at least I can buy beer.”

  “That’s true,” I said, “and God knows we’re grateful for it.”

  “Just another reflection of my Texas charm. So should we go get a movie for tonight?”

  “You go,” I said to Sherry. “I want to try to write for a little while beforehand.”

  “You’ll order the Chinese food, though,” Peter said, “right?”

  They left together, Peter and Sherry, leaving me alone to call out for the food. After I’d made the call I laid out on the sofa for a few minutes, yellow pad in hand, trying to move a story forward; but it seemed hopelessly stuck. I tried not to think about the fact that my latest opus had come back in the mail today with a rejection slip paper-clipped to it. I’d lost count of the rejections by now—at least twenty or thirty, I supposed. Occasionally an editor would scribble something encouraging on the bottom of one of these slips, but for the most part they were just impersonal rectangles of doom. It was damned depressing.

  The doorknob rattled once, then again. There was silence for a moment, then another rattle. Finally, as I knew it would, the doorbell rang. Rachel habitually forgot her keys, as she forgot so many other things. I stood and went to the door.

  “Thanks,” she mumbled, brushing past me. “Peter here?”

  “He went with Sherry to get a video. I’ve ordered Chinese.”

  She looked up at me. Her eyes were tinged red. Exhaustion? Drugs? I didn’t know. “Okay.”

  I went back to my yellow pad, but knew I would accomplish nothing with her nearby. I wasn’t very comfortable around Rachel Blackburn—no more than Sherry was, really. But I’d rarely been alone with her, since she was virtually always with Peter. I heard her shuffling around in their bedroom for several minutes. Then she came back out, wearing a different old black T-shirt than before. She made her way to the refrigerator, pulled out a beer, dropped into the armchair beside me.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Cops haven’t caught up with me yet.”

  I smiled slightly. We sat in silence for a few minutes.

  Finally she said, “What are you writing?”

  “A story.”

  “Any of them get published yet?”

  “No.”

  “That sucks,” she said, swallowing beer. She brought out her cigarettes then. “Want one?”

  “Sure.” We lit up. She smoked Camels, just like me. We sat there puffing. “How about you? Your writing, I mean. Still writing songs?”

  She looked at me. “You know what? I’m kind of losing interest in writing songs, to be honest.”

  “Really?”

  “I dunno. It was Peter’s idea. The whole band thing. It’s all right. But there’s not that much you can do in a song. I mean, lyrically. I like writing poems better.”

  “You write poems? I didn’t know that.”

  “Yeah, that’s because you think I’m just some stupid punky girl. I read books too, you know.”

  “Rachel, I never said—”

  “Well, I do.”

  “Okay.”

  “I read about dark stuff. But not, like, stupid shit. I don’t read about witchcraft or the Bermuda Triangle or shit like that.” She ran her hand through her hair which was, as always, greasy and every which way. I wondered why she didn’t take better care of herself. “I read about, like, the American Indians. Bury My Heart at Wound
ed Knee. I read that. That was some fucked-up shit. And what we did in Vietnam. I’ve read about that, too. I read a book about the My Lai thing.”

  “Wow.” I was genuinely impressed.

  “The Holocaust. I read a lot about that. I read a history of Auschwitz. I read Night. Hardcore shit.”

  “Do you ever read anything—well, lighter?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t read much lately,” she said. “With the band and all. I don’t have time.”

  “You write poems, though? Real poems, I mean? Not song lyrics?”

  “I write real poems,” she said. “All the time.”

  “I’d like to see some.”

  She eyed me suspiciously. “Really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “You might think they’re shit.”

  “I’m sure I won’t.” Actually I wasn’t so sure; but I was curious about this new aspect of my sullen roommate’s personality. I figured they would be teenage girl stuff, heavy on the angst, lots of why-does-nobody-understand-me. But I could make some encouraging remarks, I figured, and maybe our both being writers—or “writers”?—could forge some sort of connection between us.

  On the milk crate that we used as a coffee table was a black spiral-bound notebook of Rachel’s where she kept her handwritten song lyrics. It was covered with stickers that had the names of punk bands on them—Black Flag, DOA, Minutemen—and different-colored papers stuck out of it haphazardly, at odd angles. She took up the notebook and flipped through some of its contents. She brought out two sheets of paper, both with her wildly scrawled writing on them, and seemed to consider which to give to me. Finally she held one out.

  “Here,” she said. “Read this one. I think it’s pretty good.”

  The penmanship and smudges and crossings-out made it a little hard to decipher, but I was able to make it out well enough. This is what I read:

  “Shadows”

  by Rachel Lynn Blackburn

  Last night I dreamed of Anne Frank

  again. She stood in a white dress

  at the end of a tunnel black

  like a sewer. Are you there?

  she called in perfect,

  faintly British English,

  her voice reverberating back

  onto itself. I do hope

  you’re there, because I’m alone

  here and I’m very hungry.

  I watched her scrape black fog

  from the cylindrical wall

  and put it in her mouth, saying,

  You see, I eat shadows here.

  I checked my pockets, finding

  only handfuls of shadow. They spilled

  from my coat, washed down

  the tunnel, ran over her bare feet.

  Oh no, she cried, I was so hoping

  you’d brought something else….

  And then I was not there.

  She ran toward where I

  had been, calling, Hello, did you bring

  chocolate? I love chocolate! And fruit,

  and almonds. She stopped then,

  looked around. Fell silent.

  After a while, her fingers

  reached to scrape

  me mechanically from the wall.

  And, without expression, she

  placed me slowly

  into her mouth.

  “You wrote this?” I said stupidly, looking up at her.

  “Yeah?” she said, suspicion edging her voice.

  “I...” I didn’t know what to say. I was flabbergasted. “Rachel, this—this is excellent. This is—wow. Really.” Poetry wasn’t my field, but I’d read The Paris Review and The American Poetry Review at the library and grown to love the work of people like Gary Snyder, Adrienne Rich, C.K. Williams. I was no expert, but I felt informed enough to know that this poem of hers had genuine quality.

  For the first time, I saw the traces of a smile cross her lips. “You mean it? You’re not bullshitting me? You can tell me if it’s crap.”

  “I’m—it’s not crap, Rachel. It’s definitely not crap. It’s—powerful. Anne Frank in—purgatory. It’s like you want to save her, or help her, but you can’t.”

  “That’s it. That was the idea.”

  “But at the end—it’s almost like—it’s almost sort of sexual, isn’t it?”

  “Sort of. Mostly it’s just that I can’t give her any more than she already has. Just...”

  “Shadows.”

  “Shadows.”

  I had the experience of suddenly seeing someone I thought I knew—knew slightly, at least—in an entirely different light. I also felt a twinge of simple, old-fashioned envy. Jesus Christ, she was good—better, I knew, than I was. I had no chance, not then at least, of writing anything with such direct, visceral power.

  “Rachel, you have to send this out. To a literary journal or a magazine or someplace. The New Yorker, maybe.”

  She took the paper back from me and studied it. “Maybe when I revise it.”

  “It doesn’t need to be revised. You just need to type it.”

  She smirked. “I can’t type.”

  “Well, Peter can. I’ll type it if you want me to.”

  She looked at me carefully, quizzically. “You really think it’s good?”

  “I really think it’s good.”

  “Maybe I’ve just read too many Holocaust books.”

  “You should read more, if they make you write like that. God. I’m really impressed, Rachel. Seriously.” I ground out my cigarette. “Will you let me read some more?”

  “Hm.” She looked at me skeptically, playing with a silver ring embedded in her eyebrow. “Yeah, I guess. Okay.”

  But as she began sifting through her papers Sherry and Peter burst in again, laughing uproariously. Sherry had a videocassette in her hand.

  “What’s so funny?” I wanted to know.

  “Peter’s been telling me stories about the women in Dallas,” Sherry said, dropping down next to me on the sofa and still giggling. “He says they have some—um, special techniques there.”

  “They’ve got this thing,” Peter said, “called the panhandle—”

  “Peter,” Sherry cried, “that’s not real! You made that up!”

  “Go to any brothel in Texas,” Peter said assuredly, dropping onto a chair, “and they’ll know what it is.”

  “It’s physically impossible!”

  Peter looked at me dolefully. “I would have thought,” he said, “that a manly man like yourself would have taught your girlfriend better.”

  We all laughed, though in truth, I never did learn what, in his context, a “panhandle” was. The subject quickly changed as the Chinese food arrived and as the videocassette was plugged into the machine—“The Blob,” Peter announced, “in honor of the late Steve McQueen.”

  It was a fun night, the four of us together, but I had an odd feeling about it. As I sat with Sherry, my arm firmly around her after we were done with the food, the Blob merrily chasing Mr. McQueen and the other teenagers, I found myself, for the first time, wanting to talk with Rachel Blackburn. I felt no sexual attraction to her—she was average looking, if that, and I don’t know if I’ve communicated how poor her personal hygiene really was. Her underarm odor sometimes permeated the apartment. Her skin and hair made me want to dunk her in a sink full of hot, soapy water. Her fingernails were broken and chewed. Her clothes were dirty. Yet I was fascinated by the fact that she’d written the poem I’d just read. I didn’t know writers, then. I sometimes attended author readings—literary writers appeared at the Earthling Bookshop downtown, science fiction and horror people at Andromeda a few blocks away—but I knew no one. I didn’t take the creative writing classes in college. I knew I was talented—well, somewhat talented—but I felt very alone in my scribblings. The occasional scratched note from an editor did little to assuage a need I didn’t realize, until I read Rachel’s work, I’d even had: to talk to other writers, to be in their company. I’d dismissed Rachel from the beginning as a mere punk
-rock screamer, but I’d been wrong. It fascinated me that I’d been wrong. As a result I was a little impatient with the movie, slightly annoyed at Peter’s running commentary about it; and for the first time I rather wished he and Sherry had been out somewhere.

  It was a frightening realization. I’d never wanted Sherry O’Shea to be anywhere other than with me—well, mostly. There were times, studying the pretty beach girls sitting around me in class, that I imagined things that certainly wouldn’t have involved her. But that was straightforward sexual fantasy, nothing more. Every male human being on the planet, I knew, thought about the same kind of things. What I was feeling was more a desire to bond with Rachel as a fellow writer, an artist—someone who knew what it was to stare at a blank page and try to make something come alive on it. This was a level on which Sherry and I couldn’t communicate. It wasn’t that Rachel was female, I insisted to myself. It wasn’t that she was a girl who, because she lived here, was in close proximity—a closeness that I’d never shared with any other girl besides Sherry and my sister. Besides, I thought, Rachel Blackburn was no prize, really. But she wrote, wrote seriously, wrote powerfully. I was nineteen. I’d never known anybody else who did that.

  Thanks to Peter’s thoughtfully-supplied Heineken we were all half drunk by the end of the movie. That too was fun; that too was strange. Sherry and I weren’t heavy drinkers. I had the model of my father to consider, and the grim knowledge that children of alcoholics tend to either become alcoholics themselves or else teetotalers. I was wary of booze, but I did like beer. Yet I’d never really been drunk. Sherry and I used to sneak a Coors or Budweiser out of her parents’ refrigerator on occasion, sharing it furtively somewhere that we wouldn’t be discovered; we’d tried pot, too, a few times, purchased from the friendly neighborhood dealer at our high school. But these were childish experiments that led nowhere. Our image as two clean-living kids was, for the most part, perfectly accurate.

  I was aware, though, that since Peter and Rachel had arrived, our alcohol consumption had jumped considerably. On the night I’m describing I was shocked to see, when we stood to go to bed, Sherry actually stumble—she righted herself well enough, but I realized from her movements and an unfamiliar slow slur in her voice that she was well on her way to being downright intoxicated. I wondered how well I was doing. When I looked at the dozen or so empty green bottles on the milk crate and floor, and calculated how many of them I’d drained myself, I was thankful I didn’t have to drive us home. But I wasn’t overly happy to realize that I had to get up early to go to classes tomorrow.