She's Not There

by Jennifer Finney Boylan

  “Wait,” said Stacey. “Something’s moving in the house.”

  We went back to the door and knocked again. Stacey turned to us with a look of urgency. “He’s only wearing a towel,” she said.

  Lee looked at me urgently. Please, save us, she seemed to say.

  But I didn’t think I could save anybody anymore.

  Speed Racer, clad only in a towel, unlocked the door. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t hear ya. Come on in. Let’s get some clothes on.”

  Well, yes, that sounds good, I thought. He vanished. Then Stacey and Lee and I looked at one another and considered our next move.

  “I guess we just—go in?” said Lee.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  They let me go first.

  A moment later we were all standing in a filthy kitchen. Dishes were piled high in the sink. There was a calendar of a topless woman on one wall, and my first reaction was,What’s the deal with men and nudie calendars? Is it just so they can show everyone how stupid they are? Then I caught hold of myself. I sort of remembered what the deal was.

  The young man came out a few minutes later. Camouflage pants and a NASCART-shirt. Military haircut. “So,” he said. “You see her?” He meant the dog.

  “Yup,” said Stacey.

  “She’s been fixed,” he said, trying to provide any other relevant information. “Got all her shots. She’s pretty nice.” A look of trouble darkened his features momentarily. “Ah—one thing. You don’t wanna move a remote control around too fast in front of her.”

  “Okay,” said Stacey.

  I tried to imagine the consequences of waving a remote control too swiftly in the dog’s presence. They were bad, very bad.

  “So,” said Speed. “You all sisters?”

  We all smiled, although I was privately appalled. I didn’t think that Lee (with the green hair) looked very similar to me.

  “No,” I said, smoothing things out. “We’re just friends.”

  Stacey looked at me as if I had just delivered a great compliment instead of a bald-faced lie. Lee, for her part, looked at Stacey, and I could guess what she was thinking. See? she thought. I told you cesareans were cool.

  “You all look like sisters,” Speed said suspiciously.

  “Well,” I said a little more firmly, “we’re not.”

  “Whatever,” he said. “You want the dog?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” said Stacey.

  “Okay,” said Speed.

  Then we all stood there for what seemed like a long time, no one talking, no one moving. At that moment I realized neither of the girls was wearing a bra. I rather wished that they were, I thought as Speed Racer licked his lips.

  Then Lee said, “Could we, like—borrow a leash?”

  Speed Racer nodded and said, “It’s in my truck,” and a moment later we all followed him out to the mud pile where his red pickup with the SHOW US YOUR TITS! decal was parked, and we stood by as he dug around in its innards. Beer cans, floor mats, and old bags of fast food fell into the mud.

  “Here ya go,” he said at last, and put the leash into Stacey’s hands. The leash was bright red and made of what seemed to be an extra-heavy-duty material.

  Stacey went over to the dog and put her on the leash. I looked at my van, still filled with all of my rock-and-roll gear, and wondered where the pit bull was going to go. “You wanna make sure she’s near a window,” said Speed Racer. “She gets sick.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Stacey, can you sit in the back, have her sit in your lap?”

  “Yeah, sure,” she said.

  We all looked at one another. It was time for us to go. Speed Racer was looking at us with a kind of hungry expression. I opened the driver’s-side door, but just as I was about to climb in he said, “Hold on, ladies.”

  I stood there with my hand on the door handle. Lee rushed to the other side of the car.

  “I said wait, goddammit.” Speed was now turning red, and he looked scary. It was official: the three of us were all frightened now. I looked at the pit bull, pretty sure she wasn’t going to be on our side.

  “Yes, sir?” I said, hoping that even now, politeness would be counted in my favor.

  “You can’t go yet,” he said. “I’m not going to let you go yet.”

  He started walking toward me. And I thought, fleetingly, about how little upper-body strength I had now. If it came to a fight, it wasn’t going to be a very long one, even with the three of us against him and the dog.

  He came closer. I saw the muscles tighten in his jaw. I held on to my car key, hoping I could use this as a weapon if I had to. It wasn’t the way I’d imagined my death. After all these years, I’d wind up stabbed near a trailer next to a truck with a decal that said YOUR COLLEGE SUCKS.

  The dude got closer, and closer, and then—put his arms out and hugged the dog.

  “Good-bye,” he said to the pit bull. And started crying. “Good-bye, sweetie pie.”

  Stacey and Lee and I looked at one another. Lee grinned as if pleased.

  Speed Racer was crying so hard now, he was shaking. “You be a good girl,” he said, again meaning (I presumed) the dog.

  “Listen, mister, she’s going to be all right,” said Stacey. “She’s gonna live with us on our farm.” I tried to put her first sentence together with the second, tried to figure out the connection, but failed.

  “Okay, okay,” said Speed Racer, “you should just go. I don’t wanna have to—”

  Then he turned away midsentence and walked straight back into the house and closed the door without looking at us.

  Stacey got the dog into the backseat, and Lee sat up front this time. I noted that the window next to the dog didn’t open. I thought about what he’d said about how the dog got sick sometimes.

  I started the car and headed back to the road. The car lurched in the potholes.

  “We forgot to ask her name,” said Stacey.

  We drove on a little farther.

  “You think we should head back?” Stacey asked. “Ask him what her name is?”

  “No,” Lee and I said in unison.

  I drove back to 27 and headed south. “I’m going to let you girls out at the Wal-Mart, okay?” I said. “You should be able to get a ride from somebody there.”

  Lee looked back at the nameless pit bull and Stacey. “Man, you sure got a lot of stuff,” she said to me.

  “Yeah, well, keys mean a lot of equipment.”

  “Must be fun, being a musician. Playing in bands, meeting guys. You meet a lot of guys, playing out?”

  I thought about the night before. I’d gone to the women’s room during the break to find a long, long line. While waiting for the stalls, all the women were talking to one another, looking at ourselves in the mirror, fluffing up our hair with our fingernails. It made me smile, thinking about the same scene in a men’s room—everybody deadly silent, not looking at one another, concentrating on the business at hand as if soberly standing atop the bridge of a mighty inter-galactic star destroyer.

  There was one girl sitting on a chair, smoking a cigarette. I still thought this was a kick. Women’s rooms often have a little place where you can sit down and smoke, presumably just so you can have a few minutes away from your freakin’ husband. There are no such places in men’s rooms, ever. Men always ask, What took you so long? What are you chicks doing in there? Now, after this long voyage, I finally know the answer. Having a few precious moments away from you, darling.

  While I was in the stall, I heard some women scream softly, then some laughter. When I came back out, I looked at the smoking girl. “What happened?” I said.

  “You’ll never believe this,” she said. “But some guy just tried to walk in here. In the ladies’ room!”

  “A guy?” I asked. “What did he want?”

  “Beats me,” she said. “God only knows what they want.”

  I looked at Lee. “I don’t meet that many guys, playing out,” I said. “Fewer than you’d think.

  “Listen,
” I said to Stacey and Lee,“can I ask you girls a question?”

  “Sure,” said Stacey.

  “What are your boyfriends in prison for?”

  “Well, mine’s in for assault and battery,” Stacey said. She sighed. “Some guys, you break up with them, they go totally apeshit.”

  “I don’t know what mine’s in for,” said Lee. “A couple days before he took off, he asked me if I’d still love him if he ever went to jail. I said sure, whatever. Then right after that he says he’s going to go visit his aunt for a while.”

  I vaguely remembered the boy that Ashley LaPierre had been dating at Colby. He was a Canadian, from Nova Scotia, who played for the ice hockey team. I remember he told me once he was going to quit hockey for good. When I asked him how come, he pointed in turn to his knee, his ankle, his ribs, his knuckles, his wrists, and so on, and said, “Twisted, broken, broken, replaced, torn, sprained.” He pointed to his thigh. “My leg I broke twice.”

  I remembered the last time I’d seen Ashley, the day she came to my office to tell me she was dropping out of school. She’d sat there in my office chair, next to the poster of the Marx Brothers, crying.

  When she finally took her leave, I just sat there and watched her run down the hall. I didn’t suppose I’d be seeing her again.

  But I was wrong. Here we were, six or seven years later, and I was a woman, and she was the owner of a secondhand dog.

  “You ever think about going back to college, Lee?” I asked. “It doesn’t have to be Colby.”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “I know it’s none of my business,” I said. “But you should give it another try. Maybe you’d surprise yourself.”

  Lee nodded. I was expecting her to roll her eyes and grin that grin I’d seen before. But she didn’t. She looked as if this were advice that no one else had ever given her before. I wondered if I had let her down six years before, by not doing a better job of discouraging her from dropping out.

  We were almost at the Wal-Mart. “You know, I had a teacher at Colby who made a big difference in my life once,” Lee said dreamily.

  “Bullshit,” said Stacey, from the back.

  “No, remember that guy I used to talk about, the writer?”

  “Who?” Stacey said.

  Then Lee smiled, the name clicking into place.

  “Russo,” she said. “Richard Russo.” Lee shook her head. “Man, he was some teacher.”

  I nodded. “He’s not at Colby anymore,” I said.

  “Aw, too bad,” said Lee. “What happened to him?”

  I smiled. “They made his movie, Nobody’s Fool? You ever see that, with Paul Newman?”

  Lee just shrugged. “I don’t go to movies.”

  I pulled up in front of the Wal-Mart. “Okay,” I said. “You wait here, somebody’ll pick you up, take you back to Freedom.”

  “Hey, thanks for the ride, Jennifer,” Stacey said. The dog jumped off her lap, and she got out of the van. Lee waited for a moment longer.

  “Listen, thanks for helping us deal with that Speed Racer guy,” she said.

  “I was glad to help,” I said quietly. “You take care.” I so much wanted to take her hand and say, Goddammit, Ashley—it’s me!

  “Hey, Jennifer,” she said. “Can I ask you something? A favor, like?”

  “Sure.”

  “You think I could, like, ever call you up sometime, you know, just so I could talk?”

  “Sure,” I said, caught off guard. “That would be fine.” I wrote my phone number on a piece of paper and handed it to her.

  She stuffed the scrap of paper in her jeans pocket. “It’s like, sometimes there just isn’t anyone who—you know. . . .”

  “You give me a call whenever you like.”

  I looked out the window at Stacey. The dog was peeing next to the Wal-Mart sign.

  “Okay,” said Lee, and got out of the car. “See ya,” she said.

  I turned in at the Civic Center to make a U-turn, and while I waited for the light to change, I checked my purse. The money was still there.

  Across the street from me were the two girls with their thumbs out. Stacey was yanking the nameless dog along on its thick red leash.

  I drove back home and just barely had enough time to unload the keys and the amplifier and straighten the house before heading up to Waterville to meet Rick for dinner. I changed into a black twin set and a red-and-black faux-Japanese print skirt. Black hose and flats.

  We met at a Mexican place in town, Rick and Barb and I, plus Rick’s daughter, Kate. I was sorely in the mood to drink a margarita, but the last time I’d had a margarita before a fiction reading, I’d gotten lost on the way back from the restaurant to campus, which was only about a mile away, on the same road. I wound up on the other side of the Kennebec River in the parking lot of the closed-up paper mill, which is about as far away from a fiction reading as you can get.

  When I got to the lecture hall, I found it packed, just as I’d expected. People were already sitting on the floor. I scurried around, trying to find a few more folding chairs, then went up to the podium and welcomed everyone.

  “Hello,” I said. “I’m Jennifer Boylan, and welcome to the Colby Visiting Writers Series.”

  I gave Russo an emotional introduction. I talked about the time the two of us shared a small office at Colby and spent our afternoons telling jokes, talking about the Yankees, and lamenting the fate of comic writers in the publishing world. It was a time, I said, when working in the English Department was like living in the barn in Charlotte’s Web, when each day seemed full of “the nearness of rats, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.”

  Then I said, “Ladies and gentlemen, my best friend, and the country’s second best novelist, Mr. Richard Russo.”

  Rick came up to the podium, and the two of us hugged, and I put my head on his shoulder. Then I sat down, and he said, “Thanks, Jenny.”

  After the reading, a long line of readers snaked out the door, each waiting for his or her turn to get Rick to sign a book. While I waited for him to finish up, someone came up to me, a young woman I vaguely recognized from somewhere.

  “Hello,” she said. “I’m Carolyn Dorset? I used to work as an assistant in anthropology?”

  And I thought, Say your name, Carolyn. Don’t ask it.

  “I’m Jennifer Boylan?” I said.

  “Hi,” she said. “I know one of your students. She says you’re a wonderful teacher.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Now, there used to be a James Boylan on campus,” she said thoughtfully, as if she were remembering someone she had known a long, long time ago. “Are you his wife?”

  “No,” I said. I felt a little dizzy. I didn’t know what to say to her without lying. “He’s gone now,” I said.

  I stood there for a moment, wondering what I could tell this anthropologist about James Boylan, who wasn’t with us anymore. It made me feel a little sad. Carolyn saw the shadow cross my face.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “Is he . . .?”

  Then I smiled as I thought about Ashley, hitchhiking with a pit bull toward Freedom.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked. “What are you thinking about?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Someone I used to know.”

  Hurricane Ethel (Late Summer 1968)

  I was born in 1958, on June 22, the second day of summer. It was also the birthday of Kris Kristofferson and Meryl Streep, both of whom I later resembled, although not at the same time. One day when I was about three, I was sitting in a pool of sunlight cast onto the wooden floor beneath my mother’s ironing board. She was watching Art Link-letter’s House Party on TV. I saw her ironing my father’s white shirt— a sprinkle of water from her blue plastic bottle, a short spurt of steam as it sizzled beneath the iron. “Someday you’ll wear shirts like this,” said Mom.

  I just listened to her strange words, as if they were a language other than English. I didn’t un
derstand what she was getting at. She never wore shirts like that. Why would I ever be wearing shirts like my father’s?

  Since then, the awareness that I was in the wrong body, living the wrong life, was never out of my conscious mind—never, although my understanding of what it meant to be a boy, or a girl, was something that changed over time. Still, this conviction was present during my piano lesson with Mr. Hockenberry, and it was there when my father and I shot off model rockets, and it was there years later when I took the SAT, and it was there in the middle of the night when I woke in my dormitory at Wesleyan. And at every moment as I lived my life, I countered this awareness with an exasperated companion thought, namely, Don’t be an idiot. You’re not a girl. Get over it.

  But I never got over it.

  Our house had been built in the middle of a tract of land that had been a failed Quaker settlement in the 1800s. In the 1960s, the remains of the cobblestone road threaded through the thick forest, connecting the ruins of five or six stone houses. Most of the old mansions were missing their roofs. Trees grew through the living room floors. In the center of the forest—which was known as Earle’s Woods—was the elaborate, destroyed mansion of Pennsylvania’s former governor. The mansion, which had been gutted by fire, still had a lot of its old furniture in it. The burned-out house stood on the banks of a lake where sometimes I went fishing by myself. I had mixed feelings about fishing there, though, in spite of the giant brown trout that occasionally jumped out of the water and made a splash that echoed in the woods like a gunshot. It was scary, sitting there by the lake, the burned house on the bank behind me. I felt as if I were being watched.

  Sometimes I played a game in the woods called “girl planet.” In it, I was an astronaut who had crashed on an uninhabited world. There was a large fallen tree I used as the crashed-and-destroyed rocket. The thing was, though, that anybody who breathed the air on this planet turned into a girl. There was nothing you could do about it, it just happened. My clothes turned into a girl’s clothes, too, which should give an indication of exactly how powerful the atmosphere was. It changed your clothes! Once female, I walked through the cobblestone woods, past the abandoned houses, until I arrived at Governor Earle’s mansion, which I started to try to fix up. It took years, but eventually I had a nice little place put together. By the time astronauts from planet Earth came to rescue me, I had grown into a mature woman, a college professor, occasionally playing piano in blues bands, kissing my children good night as they lay asleep in their beds. My rescuers would say,“We’re looking for James Finney Boylan, the novelist. We found his rocket all smashed up back there in the woods. Do you know where he is, ma’am?”