I imagine a cloudy white bottle in the back of his teenaged closet, the contents wet and creamy like hand soap.
‘Didn’t it smell after a while?’ I ask.
‘Semen doesn’t smell.’
‘Says you.’
He shrugs.
‘It’s not the easiest substance to work with though,’ he admits. ‘The lid of the bottle got all crusty. And then my mom found it.’
‘Oh my God.’
He pats my knee again. ‘She freaked. So does this make up for the name thing?’
‘No.’
‘Your turn. Worst thing.’
I shake my head. ‘I have no worst thing.’
But I know he doesn’t believe me.
‘We’re sharing, Bell,’ he insists. ‘We’re having a moment. It’s your turn.’
He waits, and I wait, both of us wondering what I will say. Until I know what it is.
‘My worst secret is knowing that if my mother dies, I’ll be okay.’
My sentence sounds too loud, echoes in the air so I can’t take it back. I wonder if it’s true.
Bryce leans over and bites my earlobe softly.
‘Nice clean ears you’ve got,’ he says.
He leaves the door open on his way out.
In the bathroom I use wet toilet paper to wipe the brown smears dried like finger-paint to the tops of my thighs, then I peel away the soft yellow wrapper of a new ‘pearlized’ tampon hidden in my purse – knowing I should buy the unbleached organic type with no applicator, the ones good for the environment, but also knowing I’ll never be bothered to spend the money. The plastic sparkles in the light.
When I’m finished I pray, like I always do, that the toilet won’t get clogged.
As the water sinks and disappears smoothly I breathe out, closing the lid and sitting on top of it, while the word Lehi swirls round and round, its weight unfamiliar, its edges soft and fluid in my skull.
St. Paul, 4:55 p.m.
Not that I’ve ever told anyone this, but the next person I slept with after Bryce had his daughter’s name tattooed across his abdomen. Old English script like a declaration.
‘Anna.’
I told Alan it was my grandmother’s middle name. He liked it because it was a palindrome.
On my own back is a small blue letter B, the first letter of my name scratched into me professionally with a needle and ink. A letter was the most obvious choice, a part of the alphabet I wanted to be labeled with. A letter I could lie about. This twenty-five dollar investment has since stood for baseball, Bannockburn, breath, Baileys, a canyon in Utah that ‘moved me beyond words,’ and the nickname of my non-existent dog Brady.
Something for everyone; that’s what politics has done to me.
Russ’s offce had overlooked West Kellogg. It had a wide view, of a city that for me has always felt quiet, alone, and cool even in the heat of summer. We Minnesotans have come to understand the necessity of pace, and the streets are always busy with slow determination and common sense and the right amount of coffee. Among other things the long boulevard held the archdiocese of St. Paul, the science museum, the Minnesota Museum of American Art (Russ would pronounce it M-a-a like the bleating of a sheep), seven independent bookstores and one small publisher. My favorite bookstore was the Dog Ear as it was the last stop on Alan’s route. At eleven, just as my lunch break started I would whip down to street level and give myself high-heeled blisters, walking quickly to where we would meet amongst the towering stacks of used up words – to discuss the Hanovers’ Rottweiler, the still untrimmed hedge at number eighty-four, and the affairs at city hall. Alan’s ergonomically designed mailbag fitted over both his shoulders and had pockets in the sides, so if he found a book he liked while waiting for me, he’d buy it and slip it in his mail pouch.
The building where I worked for over twenty-five years was designed in the nineteen thirties and looked like an art-deco train station where women should be wearing hats with feathers and saying passionate goodbyes to men while standing in the rain. The men would have lipstick on their clean-shaven faces as they said things like, ‘I love you, kid.’
It was thirty stories tall and I knew every floor intimately.
An unexpected space, the name city hall didn’t fit with its perfect interior. Visitors speaking loudly as they entered would immediately start to whisper. Dark, exact, beautiful, even the elevator doors and stairway railings were thoughtful. According to the Historical Society of St. Paul’s PLACES OF INTEREST plaque, the style of the interior was called Zigzag Moderne, inspired by a Parisian art exhibition in the twenties.
In Memorial Hall rising tall and straight like a giant stone erection from the smoke of five peace pipes, was the God of Peace. The sort of statue one can’t believe the government spent its own money on – thirty-six feet high and made of Mexican onyx. When Russ was feeling sentimental he’d make me stop in front of it, touch its base for about four seconds, then we’d be off again. Russ made up for his lack of any kind of minority status by taking an obsessive but superficial interest in many cultures. Apart from attending every cultural festival in the city, and also to feed his interest in the Other, Russ worked closely with the Dakota and their lobbyists to ensure funding for the Minnesota Coalition for Native American Economic Development. He was sorely disappointed he hadn’t been invited to any special ceremonies as a result. We hadn’t visited the statue for almost a week after that. Then, just before the press conference when he announced his intention to run for office again, he’d gone to touch his God of Peace.
‘Hey, old boy. Tell them to go easy on me.’
In the mornings as I crossed the wide lobby with Russ’s latte, the whipped cream foaming out the top of the plastic lid, the Pioneer Press and Washington Post under my arm, my heels echoing on the waxed floor, I’d take a detour to Memorial Hall. I would look up at the Native American God of Peace, and wink. Sometimes I imagined a giant mouth giving the statue a blowjob. Other times, gold and white with morning, the names of Minnesota’s war dead etched on the walls around me, it seemed to be a gift.
I was slightly disappointed to discover the artist was from Sweden.
On reaching my office I’d be trusted with recent gossip from Russ’s secretary. Patty had large breasts and red hair, and though we shared the same office space I was paid much more. I was Russ’s confidant, charged with making important bookings, arranging flights, accompanying him to important events and scheduling everything from public appearances to his dentist appointments. I was a personal assistant, public relations officer, and designated driver. Patty answered the phones and chattered charmingly to the office visitors. He didn’t need two of us, but there we were – Patty was beautiful, and Russ was in politics. Patty’s boyfriend reduced me to wishful fantasies when he came to take her to lunch; he wore heavy boots and jeans that looked as if he’d done something exciting in them, worn and faded. Patty said he never wore underwear. ‘The skin of his cock is like velvet,’ she confided.
Our desks were made of walnut, hers covered in sayings like, ‘to enjoy the flavor of life, you have to take big bites.’
‘Russ adores you,’ she complained. ‘I don’t understand why.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Well, I do know why. I mean, you get him. I don’t get him, you know. I think he feels that I don’t get him.’
‘No one gets Russ, Patty. He’s an enigma.’
Russ appeared in his doorway and indicated that I should follow him into the hall. Patty mouthed ‘sorry’ as I left, in case I was in trouble. In the dim corridor I waited while Russ slapped the wall with a manicured hand. He held up the city council-issued pamphlet about the history of city hall that had circulated earlier that week.
‘You see this, Bell,’ he said.
‘I’ve read it, Russ. I gave it to you to read.’
He slapped the wall again.
‘Real Wisconsin Rosetta granite. Indiana limestone too. This was built by people who knew about art and liva
ble space. They had vision. Have you seen the hardwood in my office?’
‘You just turned down the grant application for the Minnesota State Theater renovation,’ I pointed out.
‘I’m a politician, Bell,’ he said waving a hand at me. ‘Not a saint.’
Bell. He said my name in every sentence.
‘Also, Bell. Do you think Patty’s skirt is too short today?’
‘Does the length of her skirt inhibit her job performance, Russ?’ I asked.
‘Blah, blah, feminist, blah. Please. What do you think?’
‘It is a bit short,’ I admitted. ‘Cute though. New designer from Minneapolis apparently.’
‘Great. Find out their name, we’ll look into a business grant.’
Russ was careful in our interactions and never inappropriate. Our relationship depended upon the knowledge that everything could have been more, perhaps. This understanding made it difficult for us to function without one another. The one year I spent in the Civil Liberties department on the fourteenth floor, he still phoned my house from Stravagin’s Piano Bar at three in the morning after his keys had been confiscated.
So while the spotlight that shone for Russ was never focused on me, sometimes it would catch my foot, or my shoulder as I turned. This instance of light reflected reaffirmed my choices, ensuring that my single blue thread was integral to the tapestry, woven, unbroken, part of the whole. Alan might have credited the moon’s pull on the water in our bodies at birth, a cosmic imprint of how our lives would unfold. A kind of Fate independent from God. Anna would call it karma.
However my life has been lived in the past, it’s up to me now to get it back. To resurrect the ghosts. Though to this day I still don’t know for sure why he did it, and why he never wrote.
I registered certain moments of my past with a website dedicated to bringing people together. Schools, jobs, military service, kickboxing classes, everyone there waiting to be reconnected. But living longer doesn’t necessarily make you interesting, and I stopped checking in – turns out I don’t know any astronauts or sex trade workers or anyone who became ultimately surprising. A few profiles claimed old classmates of mine to be communists, anarchists, happily married or something else equally unlikely, but it seemed the probable destinations of our graduate yearbook predictions – the starving artists and ‘sleeping in a ditch wearing TK’s bra’ – have opted for the security of a normal life after all. The tragedy is how average we’ve become. I’m not the exception.
But someone did find me.
This email correspondence isn’t something I chose. I was found, and neither of us ever let go. It’s a nice feeling when your past catches up with you, not in a here’s a subpoena for your four unpaid speeding tickets in Florida kind of way, but in a way that confirms when you were alive and twenty you were important to someone else at the same time. Someone who might remember the night you started a small brush fire at Turtle Park with a dropped match you were using to find the path. Someone who might remember you both looking up at the same time that evening it was too hot in August after ten or so pints while you could still hear that song playing on the jukebox even though you were outside and saying with conviction, This is our sky, you know? This is for us, and fuck everything that isn’t here, right now.
Or maybe they’d remember it differently.
Soon though, we will begin. The project I am to be part of, my past on offer to the historians, needs only my voice. I have trouble with my fingers now, and since Anna’s been back I’ve often thought of asking her to type the messages while I dictate over her shoulder. Funny how my veins have become bigger while seemingly less efficient.
Before my doctor’s appointment yesterday I put on an old brown corduroy jacket, loose but flattering. The buttons are large so I have never had a problem with them before, but this time they wouldn’t fit into the opening, as if the buttonhole had gotten smaller somehow over the last few months. I struggled, first trying one side of the button and then the other. I tried to do it looking down at my hands and then standing in front of the mirror, and finally, tears streaming down my face as my fingers fumbled, I just sat down on the bed, my shoulders bent forward, saying fuck fuck fuck.
And it’s not fair, none of it is.
I take my green inhaler from the cupboard and breathe once, the sharp chemical wind at the back of my throat barely registering, the one long, unending blast of the air-raid siren indicating the threat is immediate, even if the storm remains something I cannot see.
Mackinac
‘Hey, Rummy!’ Trainer shouts from across the restaurant.
Velvet whips around to glare at him, ponytail snapping against her perfectly blushed cheek, golden bangles clanking along her white forearms. He slinks into the kitchen, motioning for Rummy to follow. I follow both of them because I’m bored. The kitchen is hot and Chef Walter is swearing because he’s run out of basil.
‘I’ve got some of your countrymen at table fourteen,’ Trainer says to Rummy.
‘Oh ya? Where from?’ Rummy asks.
‘I don’t know, Gelf, or Golf or something.’
‘Guelph?’
Trainer claps him on the back. ‘Anyway, be a darling and remind them the going rate for tips is eighteen percent no matter what the exchange rate.’
Rummy shrugs off Trainer’s arm. ‘We give you shitty tips on purpose,’ he says. ‘It’s all part of our master plan. Starve the waiters, then send in the troops. Isn’t that right, Bell?’
He looks at me and I’m laughing. Trainer says something snotty about the Canadian army or the lack thereof and goes back into the dining room.
‘Can I get some goddamn basil over here?’ Chef Walter is shouting.
In the dining room Rummy goes over to chat with Trainer’s table. Bryce is watching his patio table through the window by the canoe bar and talking to Brenna, whose tongue, for some reason, is running slowly around her top lip. This is okay because Bryce knows the guy from the marina she’s sleeping with and has been told she cries in bed. This fact makes her less threatening. Then I remember that I’ve cried in bed, but it was about my mother and that’s different.
Straightening my bow tie I stare out of the window while trying to look busy. I do this by shifting my weight and moving my head from side to side as if scanning the restaurant for guests that need my help. A woman at table four uses her long acrylic nail to scrape Caesar salad from her daughter’s chin. The daughter is wearing white platform sandals and has her hair done in ringlets. Her mother is wearing expensive slacks and I can see the diamond from here.
‘Honestly, Mackenzie Ray,’ the mother says. ‘This dressing is bad for your skin.’
When I was much younger my mother would talk to me about ethics, without using the word exactly. On cross-country trips to Disneyland or Memphis we often made ourselves comfortable in small cities that looked nothing like St. Paul, but somehow felt familiar. Gas stations, pickup trucks, pavement, and bricks. Small parks with shit-covered statues of men in the center. Motels called Maple Lanes, Parkview, the Buena Vista, and the American Bed. Inside every motel was the same brown vending machine, with the standard selection of pork puffs and cheese bits and roast-beef sandwiches and gum. From one of these machines in South Carolina I once received two packages of Jelly Worms instead of one.
‘You can’t keep that one, Bell,’ my mother told me. ‘God will know you didn’t pay for it.’
She made me return it to the front desk of our motel, and I’m sure the person I returned it to became the benefactor of my honesty, promptly eating it as soon as we left. But the point was made. I was not allowed something for nothing. I was to pay for what I wanted.
The sun is now setting and outside the marina is full with end-of-August visitors, white yachts turning pink with diminishing light, flags flapping atop their masts. The lighthouse is bright. I’ve already made seventy dollars and it’s not even eight o’clock. Bryce washed my bike this morning and it’s shiny. Everything I could ever want h
as happened today. I don’t even need a yesterday or a tomorrow when the island is so complete in each hour of its own perfection. Maybe after work I’ll buy myself an ice cream. Or a pint.
A man arrives in deck shoes and a white linen shirt looking for his wife and daughter, his nose pink from sun or alcohol. I show him to table four and he slips me a bill which I slide into my apron, wondering at its denomination while he tells me he shot a seventy-two on the links this afternoon.
When I last spoke to my father, he answered the phone from his gardening shed. I could hear the sounds of birds.
‘Scorcher today,’ he said.
‘What did they say?’
He paused, and the sound of a chickadee came down the wire.
‘Well, it’s your mother versus the doctors and God,’ he said. ‘I’ve no doubt who’ll win.’
I imagined his large palms turned upwards as he shrugged.
‘No doubt at all,’ he said.
Table thirteen calls me over. They would like a fresh white pillar candle; the woman raises her eyebrows disapprovingly as she points to a huge bluebottle struggling in the wax. I take the tainted candle into the back room where I use a knife engraved with the words THE TIPPECANOE to lift the fly out. I try and wipe the poor thing clean, but soon the clear wax turns into a cloudy cocoon and I think how expensive hot wax treatments are at the salon on the island.
The fly dies, and I bring the woman a new candle.
I tell Rummy about it as we polish silverware later that night. I dip my muslin cloth gently into the hot vinegar and water solution, and pick up a knife.
‘A bluebottle?’ he says.
‘I guess so, the big ones. Kind of shiny.’
‘Calliphora Vomitoria,’ he says.
I sigh, while eliminating the water spots efficiently from the bowl of a spoon. We’ve got it down to one piece of silverware every three seconds.
‘What?’
‘It’s their Latin name,’ he says. ‘Vomitoria. Appropriate, eh?’
Trainer comes up behind Rummy holding a bucket of silverware still needing to be polished and says, ‘Jesus Christ, Latin? This is why you don’t get laid.’
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