Lightning Field

by Dana Spiotta

  “Rita Hayworth,” she said, and they laughed at her, and powdered her and turned her finally to look in the mirror, and there she was, pixie woman-sex-child, and she could not stop staring, so mysterious she seemed. It was a heavy movie star look, but an accent here and a smoothness there and a slight artifice about the eyes that gave her a deliberate sexiness made her suddenly dangerous. “Wow,” she said, and it changed the way she moved. She wandered about the set staring at people, anxious to be seen. It was this enjoyment of attention that worried her later when the incident with Dennis happened, and in her mind the makeup day and the incident were conflated, though she was aware that they very well might have occurred months apart, but memory had conflated them to make a logical narrative, to make a causal relation in which she could find some coherence. She felt the strain of trying to remember things as they actually were, the precise chronology, but it washopeless, gone in a veil of wishes and regrets. How particularly when someone was ill, like her brother, the chain of your memories of that person alters irrevocably. His illness became like her own personal Hays office, erasing the offense and the disquiet from all her brother memories. There were, however, the seams of the edits, the wafting hints of darkness she had forgotten. How this kind of remembering was like insanity, and the way later disturbances threw off all the pleasant dreams of her brother. They must be there, the indications, the evidence. And so she would remember things, incidents to make the present presentable and understandable. She knew the incident with Dennis was colored like the memories of her father and her brother, it was colored by her no longer being able to believe in her own innocence, or any innocence at all, even though she also knew that reality was much more complex than innocence and culpability, cause and effect, truth and lies.

  Road Stop: New Orleans

  I wake in the hotel room. Lorene is out. Sitting in some cafe, no doubt, transforming into some kind of voodoo priestess. She doesn’t want to leave. She says she wants to be in a place that respects decay. I still have to go to my mother’s. I can’t sleep. I watch TV.

  John Ireland is in a gray-checkered suit, talking in a journalist weary sexy voice.

  “Now you have a secret, too” is what Dennis had said.

  But I didn’t want a secret.

  It was not Thanksgiving, but the week after. My body confirmed what I suspected all along: it was against me, an enemy. It was not pliant, it wanted things, it grew things.

  Dennis had touched me because I had wanted him, too. I made him. He hesitated and I pushed him.

  You could just undress like you did before. If you want.

  Oh, I want, all right.

  It wasn’t Thanksgiving, but the week after.

  He looked at me, OK? And no one seemed to see me at all. I felt for the first time electric and possible.

  “She’ll never be the beauty her mother was,” my father had said.

  “Everyone has secrets, people aren’t what they seem.”

  “It’s a surveillance site. For videotapes.”

  I felt my beauty upon me when men looked at me, it radiated out, electric, and illuminated the world.

  My body had been doing strange things. Unfamiliar things.

  “Your father,” he said, “your mother.”

  You can count on it. You absolutely can.

  John Ireland was married to Joanne Dru. In real life. I know this.

  Every desire contains its counterdesire. It’s already there, embedded.

  How did — David had bruises on his hand.

  He said, with absolute confidence, “You’ll get over this.”

  It wasn’t Thanksgiving, but the week after.

  I wanted to get the thing over with, get it out of my body. Michael came home, to be there, the week after Thanksgiving. Left school and came home to me. Just like that.

  He zipped up his pants. He didn’t look at me in the same way.

  Scott cried. It wasn’t a movie to him, was it?

  Michael took me to the clinic. They wouldn’t let you do it unless you had someone to drive you home.

  “What’s up?” Michael said. “I hear this rumor you don’t eat or speak anymore.”

  “No comment,” I said.

  When you ignore me I feel as though I don’t exist.

  “Just sit tight. I’ll be there tonight.”

  “No, no, no,” I said. But he came anyway. Took me to the clinic and drove me home. He put me to bed.

  Lied to the doctor about being eighteen.

  “You’ll get over it,” the doctor said. I didn’t cry.

  “Well?” Michael had asked, holding my hand while I lay in bed. I was groggy. What did I say to him?

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it? I’ve ruined my life.”

  He said, Michael said, he looked at me and I remember what he said, “Nothing lasts, it doesn’t. I promise.”

  “Is that a comfort or a threat?”

  “The world is full of second and third and fourth chances.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Go to sleep,” he said. “I’ll take care of you.”

  ‘What?” I said.

  “Go to sleep.”

  “You’ve changed, Michael, I hate it.”

  “Yeah? I haven’t. You’re just getting older. You’re just growing up. You’re the one who’s changed.”

  John Ireland’s voice. It reminds me of my father.

  The Morning of the Day They Leave

  Lisa is cleaning Lorene’s house when Lorene makes her an offer. She shows Lisa her alarm system. She gives her space in the closet. They set up the guest room for the twins. Lorene feels exuberant doing this, letting Lisa stay in her house. She was going to be gone for a month or so, and maybe by then Lisa’s husband will have come back. Anyway, Lisa would enjoy it more than she did.

  When Mina woke on her last day, she spent a minute staring at her husband. It was not even six o’clock. She couldn’t wake him. It was overly dramatic to leave him a note. Besides, she didn’t want to explain anything. She was so weary of trying to explain things. She sensed vaguely that she might regret that, and she started to walk to Lorene’s apartment.

  The walk up Franklin facing the Hollywood Hills was eerie and quiet this early. There were hot, dry blasts of wind, the latesummer Santa Anas that made the city feel strange. Hot paradoxical winds — winds that made you sweat. Mina felt the sirocco blast of air, an undercurrent of desert. Perfect weather for an exit. The air felt heavy and pushy, hot, sudden northern blows that Raymond Chandler called red winds. Well, he ought to know, and it felt that way, red and hot and skewed, as if it might blow the pages of a calender back, the introduction of a flashback, an incantation to time slips. Mina stood at Hollywood and Franklin and looked back down, listening to tiny pieces of paper swirling in the street. The dawn light deflected and diffused, a fighting orange, a growing umbery red. The wind was red because you could feel the tabloid bloodrush ofthe city in it, a cracked Southern California creepiness that came from desert and sun and all its golden promise. You could feel Manson at the edges, and fires and riots combusting from within, and the funny way the city always seemed primed for retribution.

  Mina walked on, regarding the mock paradise. Sure, verbena and maidenhair and palm fronds, but, hey, also a Lysol alley starlet with a venereal disease, a serial killer with a keen sense of irony, a movie actor twitching on the ground while everyone watched, and the ghoulish glee of teenagers getting stoned at the alley where Sal Mineo was stabbed, or at Marilyn’s crypt. There was no cliché that this place wearied of, nothing so shopworn and spent that it couldn’t be revived with the right recasting, the right lighting, and the right framing.

  What a great city, Mina thought, and for a moment she didn’t want to leave, felt a kind of longing for it already.

  Road Stop: New York

  I am sitting at my mother’s kitchen table. The night before, when I arrived, my mother told me Michael had never shown up. Why does this not surprise me? We are looking at the li
ttle garden behind her building, Seventy-third Street behind us. It is one of those New York mornings, theTimesand the coffee and the toasted bagels. My mother is quiet. I feel my life as sordid and almost ridiculous. What have you been up to? she asksme, and I have nothing to say. I am thinking of our family. My father in Ojai, just trying to live down his mistakes. I imagine he is at the Krotona library, or meditating on the sunset, or cooking his food for dinner. It isn’t horrible. He seems not so bad from a distance.

  “If Jack were a stranger, and I met him tomorrow, I might think he was kind of a cool guy, leaving his Hollywood life behind. I mean, dropping out so completely and just trying for some ordinary spiritual, whatever, transcendence.”

  “Your brother and your father are mysteries to me,” she says.

  “Michael, I thought I was coming here to save Michael. To finally make it up to him for making him a walking elegy to all my expectations. “

  “I think it was always hard for you to accept him as he was, or as he is, I should say. But it wouldn’t have made any difference. Nothing would have turned out any differently. I tried a million times to help Michael. It doesn’t make any difference.”

  “Yeah, that’s what you think.”

  “It’s true. Some things are just unfixable, unanswerable.”

  “Well, I’m from fucking California and I want a goddamn answer.”

  My mother stops sipping her coffee. Then she smiles.

  “Right.”

  My mother unscrews the top of a jar of jelly. She spreads some on her toast. I really like seeing this, my mother putting jelly on her toast. I feel as though I might cry, I’m just so happy watching her eat toast. I imagine David, waking alone and making his breakfast in our house. Isn’t it funny how the people so familar to you, so close to you can seem impossible to grasp? You have to imagine them as strangers sometimesjust to see them. I wish I could get far away enough from my own life to look at it like a stranger, see my own life from a distance and see it as all right. My mother is chewing and looking at me.

  “What are you going to do?” she says. I shrug.

  “I think I’m gonna sleep for about three days.”

  Leaving

  Mina stopped in Lorene’s kitchen to write David a note. She wanted to say something about how leaving was such a cliché thing, and to apologize for that. But instead she just said she was off with Lorene for a little break. Lorene stood by the door in her amber-tinted sunglasses, cell phone in one hand and car keys in the other.

  “Shake a leg, doll.”

  “I’m ready,” Mina said, pasting a stamp on the envelope and leaving it in Lorene’s mailbox.

  In the ordinary moments of the past, in the uninterpreted, free-floating, sense-organized memories of childhood, she was inclined to look for clues. To rake over the randomness, to evaporate feelings and look for telltale facts. Why? Because she had convinced herself there was a moment in which these things were decided. What they were all too dense to notice. Where things could have been different. Or maybe he was this way all along. Now they know how to interpret him, put his oddness and dysfunction in perspective. The fragility wasalways in him. The family is absolved. OK, but if either scenario is true, how come Mina was just like him through all those years? How come they were so close they didn’t even have to whisper to each other, they just knew? How come one day it was this way with Mina and Michael, and the next day it was not? One day the mirror was there, the next day splintered in a thousand pieces? Because that’s how it seemed to her, that sudden — like a thing shattering. And she couldn’t do anything to change it.

  CODA

  “She’s not here, she left,” Lisa says. Michael is in the doorway of Lorene’s house. Michael nods. He smiles at Lisa for a minute. She has the door open just a crack. He isn’t as shiny as Lisa imagined Lorene’s friends might be. He looks slight and frail.

  “Just like that, huh?” Michael says.

  “Seemed like she was running away.” Lisa looks at Michael’s face. He smiles at her again, then looks down to where Alex and Alisa peer from behind her legs.

  “What a funny thing, uh, uh. .”

  “Lisa.”

  “Lisa, to run away when you live by yourself.”

  “Yeah,” Lisa says.

  “Between you and me, Lisa, I think Lorene is, well, she’s a little nuts.” He laughs at this. “I’m Michael,” he says.

  She nods. He gets hunched down and holds out his hand to Alisa and Alex. She sees he’s sweating and although he looks kind of shaky and pretty grubby, she starts to think maybe he needs to eat, or rest. That’s the first thing that occurs to her. And before she can think about it too much, Alex pushes in front of her legs.

  “Hey, do you wanna come to my birthday party?” he says to Michael. Lisa smiles, and Michael nods seriously.

  “Well, when is your birthday?” Michael asks Alex.

  “Today, I think, Mom,” Alex says, looking at his mother and nodding.

  “About three months from now,” Lisa says. She watches Alex watch Michael, his small body leaning forward, his hands balled into fists of excitement. Of course they want to see other people. Faintly, somewhere behind that, she feels something else. About herself. The only adult she’s spoken to in days is the woman at the supermarket.

  “Do you mind if I get a glass of water?” Michael says the words, then Lisa nods. She stands there nodding and there is a pause and then she opens the door. Is it desperation or optimism that makes people take risks, or start to long for things?

  “I’ll get the water,” Lisa says. “Have a seat.” Michael sits on the couch. He is sweating and he smiles weakly at her. He holds his head for a second, then looks around Lorene’s living room. Alex and Alisa are standing by the arm of the couch, staring at the man their mother has led into the living room. Lisa looks at them for a moment, then leaves them and goes into the kitchen. She gets the filtered water out of the refrigerator and fills a glass with ice. Ice also made from filtered water. Good, clean, pure water. The ice cracks when she fills the glass, and she decides to get some cookies out and put them on a smallplate. This is something she is really good at, taking care of people, and she likes doing it. She feels most like herself doing it, she is aware of this, also.

  Lisa pushes open the kitchen door with her shoulder, balancing the glass of water and the dish of cookies in each hand. Michael leans against the arm of the couch. His eyes are closed and he is breathing heavily. Lisa puts the glass and dish down.

  “Hey, what’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s sleeping, honey.” Lisa sits on a chair across from the couch.

  “Why?”

  “He’s tired, I guess. Now be quiet.” Lisa reaches for a cookie, eating slowly as Michael sleeps. His hands have fallen away from his lap. Lisa notices he has many circle scars, maybe burns, on the tender skin on the underside of his upper arm. Over and over.

  Lorene walks through New Orleans, she inhales the city. Its strangeness. The oldness and decay relieve her of things. She thinks about finding someone to talk to. Or not. She spends all day in a cafe reading a nineteenth-century novel she found in a secondhand store. How exhausted she feels, how she just wants to sit and do nothing. She watches the slightly worn-out city, the way it encourages her to do nothing, and she thinks she could stay awhile. “I think I’m falling in love,” she says, in a postcard, which she plans to mail to Mina tomorrow. But when she gets up from the table, she leaves the card behind, already tired of the sentiment.

  Mina wakes up on the couch at her mother’s. She thinks she’ll call David. Tell him she’s coming back. Well, what else is thereto do? She gets up and drinks coffee alone. She decides to take a walk through the park. It’s early, but already the place is full of determined runners and people walking their dogs. She hasn’t been in Central Park since she visited Michael at Columbia. Mina walks all the way to 116th Street, and over to the Columbia campus. It feels so long ago, another lifetime that she was here, the most desperate t
ime in her life, worse even than right now. She had made herself forget how awful it felt, how lost she was. And it seems as she crosses the campus that she is able to remember it all for the first time, with nothing internal fixing it up. She actually has to walk here, on these streets.

  A toothless man half-heartedly holds out a cup to her. She hands him a dollar.

  She never fails to give money to vagrants and street people. Homeless people, bums, crazy people, damaged people. She stops no matter what and gives them something. She knows why she does this, why she gives them money: not out of sympathy for their suffering, not even out of pity, but as a talisman against them.

  In the midst of the very worst year, the year her parents finally divorced, the year her fascination with not eating had quietly saturated every part of her existence, in the year of her deepest self-loathing, Mina called her brother at school. She had to escape. Although it was in the middle of midterm exams, he immediately insisted she get on the next plane to see him. He did this, insisted, at a time when surely he was barely holding it together. He’d already had one serious episode, perhaps even been hospitalized for a stint. She didn’t know at the time. She was mostly thinking about her own troubles. She did not want him to see her because she was so ashamed of whatshe was, but he insisted, as he always did. When she arrived at his dorm in Johnson Hall, when she finally saw him, all her rules collapsed. He was there at the door, smiling and handsome. Somehow the strangers they had become to each other had retreated. He was old Michael again, or at least puttting on a good show of it. And it made her normal and OK, her old self, or at least a good show of it. They spent one great afternoon walking around the campus, not saying much, but feeling playful and happy. He took her to the large and unfinished cathedral only blocks from his dorm. “Cathedrals are nice places,” he said, with no irony and no smirking. It had never occurred to him to go inside before. They felt hushed and humbled at the entrance. The light filtered through huge stained-glass panels. Mina was glad for the light and glad simply for those words,stained glass,words that seemed as mysterious and pleasing as the colored light itself, describing glass built to be shone through, designed to make something beautiful— sunlight — even more perfect, which seemed both full of hubris and nearly brilliant to her, not ethereal but human and touching. This was even more the case when she examined the figures portrayed in the stained glass — skiers and soccer players.