Sometime in the middle of the night I had to use the toilet, so I stood to step out to the bathroom. The apartment was dark and silent, so I didn’t bother to put on anything—the door to the bathroom was only three steps from our bedroom. Nude, I slipped in, closed the door behind me (I did have some sense of modesty), urinated in the dark, flushed, ran some water over my hands, and then opened the door again.
To my surprise, Rachel was standing there in a tattered nightshirt.
A quick little smile crossed her lips, but she made no remark. Instead she simply held out a sheet of paper to me and murmured, “You can read this one.”
I took the paper in my hand and she padded back to their room, shutting the door softly.
I returned to our room, dropped down next to Sherry. I listened to her breathe in the darkness. The poem earlier, all the beer, my encounter with Rachel just now—all of it was combining to roil me inside. Unfamiliar sensations were washing through me. I wasn’t horny. Somehow, looking at Sherry’s soft form in the darkness, she felt far away from me.
Don’t leave me, I heard her saying again, in my mind. Please don’t leave me.
4
The next day was warm and cloudless. Classes done, I’d driven back home, picked up a paperback—it was Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness, I was on a Southern kick—and wandered into town, finally dropping down on the lawn in front of the historic courthouse, not far from its old Spanish-style entry arch. The El Mirador clock tower loomed behind me, stately and majestic. A huge palm tree offered comfortable shade. I’d been sitting there for a few minutes, sprawled my stomach and reading, when I sensed someone standing behind me.
As I turned Rachel said, “Hey.”
“Hey,” I said, shielding my eyes from the sun that was directly behind her. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“I could say the same.” She sat cross-legged beside me. She was in her usual getup—jeans, torn black T-shirt, sandals—and had a white plastic shopping bag in her hands. “Where’s Sherry?”
“She has a class. Peter?”
“Class.”
“What about you, though?” I asked. “Jeez, what is it, three-thirty? You’re not usually up at this hour.” She and Peter often stayed out late at rehearsals; Peter got up the next morning for school, but Rachel would sleep into the mid-afternoon. I often came home at the end of a day of classes to find she wasn’t up yet.
“Went to bed early last night,” she said. “I actually saw some of the morning, you know? I don’t do that much.”
“No band rehearsal last night?”
“Aw, fuck.” She reclined onto her back and stared up the sky. I studied the bloody rose-stem tattoos on her feet. “You know what? I think the band is fucked. Brad—that’s the bass player—quit. We haven’t been able to find a replacement. You don’t happen to play bass, do you?”
I chuckled. “Sorry.”
“You don’t look right anyway. We’re not a hippie band. But, shit. Now the drummer is talking about leaving. The whole thing is falling apart.”
“Damn.”
“I haven’t told Peter, but I think I’m giving it up. Like I told you, it was all his idea anyway. I was dating the guitar player, John, the guy in the band, who was a friend of Peter’s. Peter came in—you know how he is—and decided he was going to manage them. I don’t know, it seemed like a good idea. I was writing some lyrics for them. Sometimes I’d just play around at a microphone, you know? Sing a little? While they were playing? Peter decided that I should be in the band. I don’t know. I tried. I don’t think I’m very good. Peter says I am, but I think I suck.”
“You don’t suck as a poet.”
She sat up again and rustled cigarettes out of her bag, silently offering me one. She lit them both and handed one to me.
“Did you read it?” she asked. “The one I gave you?”
“I read it. It’s great.”
“C’mon. You’re just being nice to the roommate.”
“I almost remember it,” I said. “It opens like, ‘My mother came to see me one night’...”
“ ‘Visited.’ ‘My mother visited me one night.’ I, um...I have it here.” She reached into the bag again and brought out her black writing notebook. She placed a copy of the poem on the grass between us. I was surprised at how vulnerable she looked just then: her eyes, generally hard as agates, had softened as she glanced tentatively at me, then at the poem again.
“Perfume, and Silence”
by Rachel Lynn Blackburn
My mother visited me one night.
She sat on my bed, like she used to
when I was twelve, and touched
my forehead with featherlike fingers.
Why aren’t you home? she asked me,
her voice hollow as wind.
She had been dead seven years.
But I had no words to answer,
no words to ask how she had found
me here, in the Mojave, or where
she thought “home” was. Her body
was air. Even the odors of whiskey
and decay, present always on her,
were only faint perfumes.
It was the dry season, and still.
Night birds passed my open window.
I would not speak to the dead.
So she faded then, after a while,
slowly, to dim sparkles suspended
in the dusty silence. She vanished.
I didn’t forgive her.
And outside, the moon turned black
in the sky.
“You wrote it...in the Mojave Desert?” I asked.
“Yeah. I lived there for a few months, in the middle of nowhere. After I left home. I ran out of money and had to stop. I bussed tables in a truck-stop place and lived out back of the restaurant, in this little shack that was really just a storage unit. That’s where I wrote it.”
“Wow. Left home...from where? I don’t know where you’re from.”
“North Dakota,” she said. “The High Plains. If you can believe it. I’m not sure I can.”
“What brought you out here? To Santa Barbara?”
She shrugged, took a drag on the cigarette. “I was on my way to Hollywood. Never quite got there.”
“Well, it’s not that far down the road, you know.”
“I know. Maybe I’ll go eventually. But I came here, I got a little job for a while—waitressing—met a few people. Pretty soon, like I say, I was dating John, the guitar player. Then Peter came into it.”
“Were you planning to be a movie star?”
“Ha! With my face? I’m not that dumb, Ben. No, I wanted to write. Write movies. I tried writing screenplays. Well, not really screenplays. More like little stories that could be turned into movies. I sent them to studios back when I was still at home. Most of the time nobody answered, but a couple of times I got nice letters. I thought maybe if I was there— ” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Stupid idea.”
“If you’re as good at movies as you are at poetry, though...”
“I’m not. My movie stories were weird. They didn’t have that ‘story arc’ they say that movie people want. They weren’t commercial.”
“Still...”
“Nah. I gave that up. I’ll stick to poetry.”
I looked down at the paper on the grass. “So—your mother’s dead?”
“Mm-hm. Both my parents, actually.”
“Brothers? Sisters?”
“Nope.”
I looked at her. “You’re alone in the world?”
“Well, there are some aunts and uncles. I haven’t had any contact with them in a long time.”
“And your mother was an alcoholic?”
“Yeah. Doesn’t matter. She died a long time ago.”
“What about your dad?”
“Cancer. Almost two years ago, now. I’d just turned eighteen.”
Her voice was flat, affectless, yet I found myself feeling sad for her. For just an instant she seemed to my eyes v
ery young, very helpless: a lost child.
“I didn’t get any money, in case you’re wondering,” she said, looking off toward the traffic on Anacapa Street. “Dad was in debt up to his eyeballs. Everything was sold. The house, the property. The whole farm.”
“I have a hard time picturing you as a farm girl.”
“I was, though. I didn’t dress like this, I can tell you. Dad would have tanned my hide. He was very old-fashioned.” She paused for a moment, then said: “He was a good guy, though. My dad.”
“I’m sure he was. You seem to have come out all right.” I don’t know what made me say it; in many ways it was obvious she hadn’t come out all right. But she smiled then, a big smile, the first really full smile I’d ever seen on her: there was a gap between her two front teeth, I discovered, like the model Lauren Hutton. It gave her a cute, slightly goofy look.
“Thanks!” she said. “To be honest, I didn’t think you liked me.”
“Why would you say that?”
“I don’t know. People don’t. It didn’t seem like you did. I know Sherry doesn’t like me.”
“Sure she does.”
“C’mon, Ben. She hates me.”
“She doesn’t hate you. She just...Sherry’s—what’s the word? Conventional. She’s very conventional. We come from a small town too, you know. She—we haven’t seen too many girls like you.”
We finished our cigarettes.
“So you like the poem?” she asked.
“I think it’s beautiful. I mean it. It’s—painful. Sad.”
“I guess it is.”
“I’m serious about you sending out your stuff. You should.”
“Maybe sometime.” She put the poem back into the folder and closed it. “It’s not like those movies I tried to write when I was a kid. These are more—personal.”
“Sure.”
“So I’d have to think about it.”
“Okay.” I pointed. “What else have you got in that bag?”
“This?” She took it up and poured out its contents. There were several books, mostly Holocaust-related: Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel.
“Heavy stuff,” I said, flipping through them. “How do you afford to buy them?”
She snickered. “What do you mean, ‘buy’?”
“Ah!” I tossed Primo Levi onto the grass. “And so I learn your secret.”
“Yeah, well. It’s pretty easy to shove a paperback into your pants. You should try it sometime. Go to the used store, the Book Den, on Anapamu. It’s easier to steal from a used store than a new one.”
“You know, there is a public library in this town.” I pointed. “Right over there.”
“Aw, you’re no fun. Live a little.”
“I’m living. I don’t think I’m dead.”
“You and Sherry need to loosen up. You’re too goody-goody.”
“You called me a hippie a few minutes ago.”
“Oh God, hippies are the ultimate goody-goodies!” She laughed and flopped to her side in the grass, looked at me for a moment, then reached out and took a lock of my hair in her hand. “Doesn’t it get in your eyes?”
“All the time.”
“You should cut it,” she said, tossing it back at me. “You look like a refugee from 1968.”
“Want me to tell you what you look like?”
“Definitely not!”
“Well, then.” I reached out and gently touched a silver hoop in her eyebrow. “Do these hurt?”
“Only if you try to rip them out.”
She rummaged in her pants pocket for a moment and brought out a small, crumpled envelope. She glanced into it, then looked at me. “Hey,” she said quietly, conspiratorially, “do you want to drop acid?”
“Acid?”
“Yeah. I’ve got two tabs here.”
“Um...” I felt myself scowling. “I, um...”
“Oh, come on. Don’t tell me you’ve never dropped acid before, hippie boy.”
“Hippie boy has never dropped acid.”
She smirked. “Shit.” From the envelope she brought out two small rectangles of what looked to be gray plastic. “It’s easy. You just chew it. Leave it in your mouth for a couple of minutes, chew it like gum. Then swallow it. It’s cool. Peter and I do it all the time.”
I studied the little blocks, trying to conceal my surprise that we were talking about this so openly—quietly but openly—on the grass in a public place, with people passing by on the sidewalk.
“Where did you get it?” I asked.
“From Peter. I don’t know where he gets this stuff. He can get anything. C’mon. They’re not real strong. They won’t fuck you up—well, not too much.”
Today the idea of dropping something so powerful into my mouth, not knowing where it came from or exactly what it was, would simply be out of the question. (Known poisons—cigarettes, alcohol—are another matter.) But at nineteen one’s mind works differently. Mine did, anyway. I worried that Rachel would think I wasn’t cool. Why I cared about Rachel Blackburn’s opinion wasn’t completely clear to me.
“How long does it last?” I asked.
“A few hours. It takes an hour or two for it to really get going. You peak for an hour or two. Then it fades.”
“You’ve taken these? This exact type?”
“Are you kidding?” She grinned. “I was tripping on this shit the day I met you guys.”
“I—I don’t think so, Rachel.”
“Come on. It’s no fun to be tripping on your own.”
“You’re going to do it?”
“Ha. Watch me.” And she popped one of the little rectangles into her mouth, chewing it slowly. I watched her for a long moment.
“Okay,” I said finally, my pulse suddenly racing. I couldn’t imagine it would be very bad—not here, in the bright sunlight, on the smooth green grass. “Give me the other one.” I held out my hand.
She leaned close. “Open your mouth.”
I did. She placed the little gray thing on my tongue.
“Now chew.”
I did. The taste was metallic, like the taste of tin foil. It was neither pleasant nor unpleasant. After a minute or two we swallowed.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“Nothing. Just let it do its thing.” She reclined back onto the grass. I did the same. We stared up at the blue sky. It looked no different from before.
“My dad is too,” I said. “An alcoholic. Like your mom.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
We lay there for a long time. I was very aware of her next to me, our shoulders only inches apart. Sherry seemed far from me then—far physically, far emotionally. For a moment I had trouble remembering what she looked like. I wondered why I was here, taking drugs with this girl, staring at the sky. It wasn’t that I disliked Rachel—not anymore, at least; learning something about her background had humanized her for me, kept me from seeing her as just another person, interchangeable with many others like her that one would see on the streets of Santa Barbara. The punk fashion, the hair, the piercings and tattoos and ripped tank tops. No, I didn’t dislike her; but she wasn’t my type. She was into things I had no interest in, like punk music and, until the past few minutes, drugs. Physically I found her unattractive, though her big gap-toothed smile had a certain charm. But her body was so different from Sherry’s. Sherry was a big girl, big-shouldered, big-hipped. There used to be a word for her physical type: blowsy. Like all so-called redheads, she was pale. Tan-colored freckles covered her cheeks and shoulders and ran spottily down her back and to her bottom. Sherry wasn’t necessarily the prettiest girl in the world, but she could be sexy as hell in the right outfit, with her sleepy eyes and all that lustrous hair pouring over her shoulders. Rachel was her complete opposite physically. She wasn’t really pretty either, but she was small, tightly and compactly built, dark-featured. Her body had a sharp, hard outline, judging from what I could see of her arms and shoulders and legs, whereas Sherry was softer, blurrier. Rache
l almost appeared to be a child at times, a pubescent girl dressed like someone older, a teenager or young adult, while no one would ever mistake the busty Sherry O’Shea for a child.
We said nothing for some time. As I stared at the sky I began to notice that it seemed to be intensifying in color—the blue was turning truly blue. Within the color little sparkles seemed to materialize and glitter. Oh shit, I thought, it’s actually happening. For a while I’d hoped that Rachel had been kidding or that I’d gotten some sort of dud—that nothing would occur, that I would walk away from this perfectly normal and yet with Rachel’s approval for my guts in trying it. But the longer I stared at the sky, the more I realized that I was out of luck. The blue seemed to be growing deeper somehow—not in color, but in my sense of its dimension, the limitlessness of the sky. It seemed as if I could reach out my hand and extend it forever into that blue, that it would never end.
“Anything happening?” Rachel asked. I was surprised to hear her voice, surprised to realize that she was still there next to me.
“Yeah,” I said, surprised also that I still had a voice. “Yeah. That blue.”
“I know what you mean. I see it too. Wow. It’s like forever.”
The sky was sparkling now, blue on blue, little blue bursts like tiny exploding stars. It was an amazing sight, precisely because it was so obviously real: I felt that what I was seeing had always been there, but that my eyes had been too imperfect to perceive any of it until now.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
I was still aware enough of my surroundings to wonder how we must look to the people around us. Surely we were sparkling ourselves, or levitating, or something else that would reveal what we’d done, what we were doing. But when I looked toward the street I suddenly felt calm: no one would notice a thing, mostly because they were all so far away. Anacapa Street appeared miles off, the cars and people like toys in the distance. Someone spoke into my ear: I started. But when I looked I saw that it was a man talking to a child as they walked through the archway of the courthouse. They weren’t close at all.
Lullaby for the Rain Girl Page 17
