The Blurry Years

by Eleanor Kriseman

  I wandered into the closet—one you could walk into—and ran my hand over the shoulders of the identical blue button-downs on Mr. Silverman’s side of the closet. Stroked his ties. I didn’t know what he did for work but it was obviously something important. He was definitely in charge of something. I moved over to Mrs. Silverman’s side, studying the dresses and pantsuits. I wondered if I would ever have a job where I had to wear a pantsuit. The hangers were coated with velvet.

  I had reached an age where my teachers had started to tell us that we could be anything. “If you try hard enough, you can be anything you want to be!” read a poster in Mr. Gomez’s classroom. But I wanted to be someone else completely. There was no way to try hard enough for that.

  I slid one of the dresses off of its hanger. Black and beaded, with thin straps and a back that dipped low. It was a little big on me, but Mrs. Silverman was small, and it stayed on my shoulders. The weight of it surprised me. I slid a pair of silver heels out from a cubbyhole. She was a seven, just like me. I pulled my hair up and puffed it with one hand, trying to make it look like the fluffy hair all the girls had in magazines. I stared at myself in the full-length mirror, twirling around to see my ass, which was sticking out more than usual because of the heels. I admired my back in the mirror, how the dress dipped low, lower than the waistline of my cutoffs, which were in a pile with my tank top on the floor.

  I almost felt like I was someone else, like I had tried hard enough. Only my eyes betrayed me—reminding me that I was just looking back at myself. I wasn’t someone new. I would never be Mrs. Silverman, or anyone like Mrs. Silverman. I wanted to rip that poster off the wall of the classroom. I wanted to ask Mr. Gomez if he had tried hard enough, if that was the ‘anything’ he had wanted to be. I wanted to tell my mom she hadn’t tried hard enough—that maybe if she had, I could be something. But I knew that would make her sad or angry. And I didn’t want that, didn’t want to make anyone feel the way I had the other night when I’d walked to Jazz’s old apartment.

  My arm hurt from holding up my hair, and I let it down, unzipping the dress and letting it slip to the floor. I felt a tiny thrill from being naked in someone else’s house. I hung up the dress and put the shoes back exactly as they’d been.

  Mrs. Silverman had so many pairs of underwear, and bras to match. I wondered what it was like to get undressed in front of someone, to put yourself on display like that. I found a small purple bra in the back of a dresser drawer, with mesh cups that you could see right through, and a pair of underwear to match, purple mesh with purple flowers embroidered on the sides. I put them on. I wanted someone to undress me, to be surprised at what was underneath. I wanted to show Marcus, or Starr, someone who thought I was just a kid still. I wasn’t a kid anymore. I was fourteen.

  I could get used to wearing underwear like this, I thought. I would like to get dressed every morning in a closet like this.

  Max let out a couple of soft cries, and I startled, stripping in a hurry, and putting my own clothes back on. I stuck the bra and underwear in my pocket. Mrs. Silverman had everything. I could have that.

  I tiptoed into his room, but he was already asleep again, and I just stood over the crib, watching his little baby chest rise and fall. I kind of wished I’d gotten there when he was still awake. I wanted to know if he was heavy to hold. I couldn’t believe how tiny his fingers were, his fingernails. I reached in and put my pointer finger on his palm. In his sleep, he curled his hand around my finger, more strongly than I’d expected. He wouldn’t remember this, and that made me feel powerful and sad at the same time. I wondered how many things I didn’t remember, if I would want to remember them. I wondered if my mom had snuck into my room when I was little, just to watch my fingers curl around hers. I didn’t even know if I’d had a room of my own.

  There are just a few pictures of me as a baby. In one of them, I’m slumped over my mom’s shoulder, pouty and asleep. She looks beautiful, but exhausted. The circles under her eyes stick out even in the photo, making her eyes look bigger than normal. Almost like she’s pleading for help. I don’t know who took the picture. My mom always says she doesn’t remember.

  I heard a noise downstairs and froze. They weren’t supposed to be home for another hour at least. I clung to the side of the crib. I wasn’t sure if I should go look, stay here with the baby, or grab him and hide. But he’d wake up if I did that. I was shaking when I heard “Callie?” coming lightly from downstairs. It was Mrs. Silverman. I walked out of the baby’s room to find her coming up the stairs. Her bangs were flopping onto her forehead now, and her lipstick had faded and creased into the corners of her mouth. She was holding her heels in one hand and the corner of her dress in another. She still looked beautiful but she looked tired, and confused.

  “What were you doing upstairs? Is Max all right?” she asked, and breezed by me, leaving a faint and temporary scent of perfume that had been too strong at the beginning of the night. Before I could answer, she came out and flopped down on the top of the staircase, her dress billowing out behind her. “God, I thought something had happened when I couldn’t find you, and then you were up with the baby…” she was talking to herself more than me. I sat down next to her, my denim cutoffs riding up, thighs flattening, goose bumps spreading down my legs from how cold they kept the house.

  “I was just making sure he was okay,” I said. “I mean, I didn’t want anything to happen while you were gone. Sorry.”

  She laughed. “Don’t be sorry! I’m glad you care. I must have scared you, coming home early. I just missed him.”

  “But he’s asleep,” I said, feeling dumb.

  “Oh, I know,” she said. “I’m not going to wake him up or anything. I just… it’s embarrassing. I hate to be away from him for too long. Even Steve—my husband—thinks I’m silly. But he’ll catch a ride home later. I had to see my little Max. I can’t stop thinking about him when I’m not with him.” She sighed, in a happy way. “Did you have dinner?”

  I nodded. “Thanks. It was good.” It had been really good. There was so much in their fridge.

  “Is your mother able to pick you up?” she asked. “I wasn’t even thinking when I came home without Steve. Don’t worry, I can always ask the neighbors to drop you off.”

  My mom was at home, alone like she wanted to be. I was pretty sure she would hang up if I called her for a ride, and I didn’t want one from a stranger. “Yeah,” I said, “I’m sure she can.” I faked a phone call, and waited while Mrs. Silverman dug through her purse and handed me a couple of twenties.

  “Would you like me to wait with you on the porch?” she asked.

  “Oh, no!” I said. “That’s fine. She’ll be here in a minute.”

  “Thank you so much,” she said. “Sorry I surprised you earlier! Have a good night, sweetie!” As soon as she closed the door behind me I turned and watched through the frosted glass panel as she ran upstairs again. I didn’t get it. Max was asleep. What was she going to do? Just sit next to him in the dark?

  I waited a minute and then took off walking.

  When I let myself in, my mom was on the couch, staring slightly above the TV, which was on as usual. “Well, look who’s back,” she said, smiling. She put her drink down on the coffee table and left the room, came back from the kitchen with another drink in her hand.

  “You already have one here,” I said, then regretted it. I didn’t know what would make her turn on me anymore. But she didn’t get mad this time.

  “I know,” she said. “It’s for you. You can take care of a kid, you’re old enough to drink. No fun drinking alone, anyway!” She handed me the glass.

  I hadn’t had anything to drink since Starr’s. My mom didn’t know about Starr and me drinking, and I liked that. This was vodka though. There was orange juice in there too, but not much, because I could see through the liquid, murky like seawater. I stood there, just holding it. She clinked her glass against mine, and a little bit spilled out. “Cheers,” she said, and brought the glass
to her mouth. I did the same.

  I lost track of how many times she refilled our glasses. They were never empty, so it never felt like another whole drink, just a little bit more. The ice began to melt, stopped clinking against the sides of our glasses, diluting the orange juice but somehow making the vodka more potent. She turned into a different type of person. Nicer. But the only person who was doing something different was me. I thought maybe this was how I could get to her. Maybe if we were both drunk together, we could get along.

  I had no idea what time it was. I reached into my pocket to show her the money Mrs. Silverman had given me. I wanted to show her that I could be useful. I could be independent, too. Instead, I pulled out a fistful of purple underwear. Fuck, I thought. I’d forgotten I’d taken Mrs. Silverman’s lingerie—it was so flimsy that it didn’t even take up enough room in the pocket of my shorts to remind me.

  My mom raised her eyebrows. “Paid you in underwear, did she?” I smiled. She was different. I was in on the joke this time. I wasn’t the joke anymore.

  “Nope. I took ‘em,” I said, trying to sound the appropriate amount of proud. I still wasn’t sure how she’d feel about it—they were her customers too. “She had so many!” I said. “She’s not going to miss them.”

  My mom shook her head. “Well, let’s see,” she said. I wasn’t sure what she was asking.

  “Go on, put ’em on! Let’s see.” I stood up to go to the bathroom, and my vision faded to black for a moment, but she grabbed my arm before I could go any further. “I’m your mother,” she said. “You can change in front of me.”

  I undressed sloppily, trying not to topple over, and fastened the bra on the tightest setting, adjusted the underwear so they covered more of my butt. I’d thought I looked sexy in the mirror in the closet at Mrs. Silverman’s, but when I looked down at my body in the fluorescent light, all I could see were things that were wrong with it—my stomach stuck out slightly. My breasts were just too small to completely fill out the cups. Everything was see-through. My mom said nothing for a little while—thirty seconds, a minute, I don’t know. Time was blurring, bleeding from one moment to the next in a way I’d never felt before. I folded my arms across my chest.

  “Not bad!” she said. “I better be the only other person who sees you like that for a long time though, if you know what I mean.” I did, but I didn’t say anything, just started putting my clothes back on over the purple lingerie, leaving my white cotton underwear on the carpet. I sat back down, because I thought I might throw up if I stood any longer. My mom moved closer, and put her arm around me. “This is nice,” she said, taking another long sip of her drink. It had been years since she’d touched me like that. “Mmmhm,” I whispered, and curled up on the couch, resting my head on her lap.

  I woke up the next morning on the couch, with an ache in my neck and a pounding headache. My blanket was tucked around me. The clock on the VCR told me it was only 6:46 a.m., so I tiptoed to the bathroom. My stomach heaved. In the bathroom mirror, I studied my face. The grainy texture of the couch pillow had left marks, little red indents that dotted my cheek. I hadn’t moved at all in my sleep. The circles under my eyes were dark and purple.

  Then I felt it. I pulled my hair back with an elastic and gripped the side of the sink and the wall while I threw up, over and over again. I switched on the fan to clear out the smell, hoping the noise hadn’t woken my mom, and gargled with mouthwash. I smiled, despite how awful I felt, and walked gingerly back to the couch. Unfolding the pullout bed, I fell asleep again, head heavy with my first real hangover, to the memory of my mom reaching her arm around me.

  13

  I figured out which house it was from all the cars parked out front, but nobody acknowledged me when I walked in. I wasn’t really sure why I’d gone. Boredom, I guess. My mom was working late and I didn’t feel like spending another night in that apartment, lying on the couch and watching the minutes pass on the VCR. I found the kitchen quickly, grabbed a beer from the fridge, and knocked the top of the bottle hard against the edge of the counter. The cap fell off easily into my hand and I took a swig from the bottle, getting mostly foam. “That was pretty cool,” someone said. I looked behind me. A boy stood in the doorframe of the kitchen with a red cup in his hand. I shrugged my shoulders.

  “I guess,” I said. He stayed where he was, blocking my way out, but not like he wouldn’t have moved if I had asked.

  “I mean, most girls would have just asked a guy to open it for them,” he said.

  I remembered the time when I’d walked into the kitchen one night to get some water because the bathroom tap was broken and I was thirsty and feverish from a summer cold. My mom had been in there with Daryl, about to open another beer, leaning on the counter like she was about to fall over.

  “Hey, Cal, why don’t you learn to open these for your mom? Just hit it on the side of the counter like this. This is a cool trick,” she said, and knocked the top of the bottle against the edge of the counter. The bottle cap clinked on the tile floor and she kicked it aside, near the trashcan. “Just try it,” she said, and grabbed me another bottle from the fridge. “You can open one for Daryl.” I was eight. My forehead was hot and the cold medicine hadn’t kicked in yet. I wanted water, and I wanted to go to bed.

  “It’s gonna break, Mom,” I said.

  “No it won’t,” she said again. “Just try it.” I knew she’d get angry if I said no. She was showing off. I took the unopened bottle from her hand, and bumped it on the corner of the counter. Nothing happened. “Harder,” she said.

  “Jeanie, don’t you think—” Daryl said, and she shushed him.

  “I’m gonna break it, Mom,” I said again.

  “Just try it, Cal,” she said. Then she looked at me like I was an adult and said, “You’re always so afraid to try anything.” I slammed it into the counter and the bottle shattered. Shards of brown glass gathered around my bare feet and the stale smell of beer filled the kitchen. The brown liquid spread quickly on the tile. “Goddamn it!” she said, and walked out of the room.

  “Don’t move,” Daryl said, and lifted me up. He carried me to the bathtub and set me down. “Wash your feet off and get to bed. I’ll clean up. Hey, don’t cry. Don’t cry, Cal.” I wasn’t crying because I was hurt. I was crying because he was so nice. It was weird how that could make you cry, just someone being nice to you when you didn’t even deserve it.

  “My mom taught me,” I said to the boy, snapping back to this kitchen, this party, this conversation.

  He looked surprised. “Cool,” he said. “I’m KJ.”

  “I’m Callie,” I said. He looked young. I mean, he looked my age. His nose was big and peppered with blackheads. Oily. I couldn’t stop staring at it, which I guess was good because otherwise I would have been staring into his eyes. He had long eyelashes. My mom got so mad when she saw boys with long eyelashes. She’d point them out to me, little boys tugging on their mothers’ shorts at the grocery store, or the skateboarders who hung out on the wheelchair ramp outside our building. “It’s not fair, Cal,” she’d say. “I bet he can’t even wear sunglasses, his eyelashes are so long.”

  “You have long eyelashes,” I said to KJ, because I realized we’d been quiet for a few seconds. Then I bit my lip. I did it because I was nervous but then I realized it looked like I was flirting. I hadn’t kissed a boy yet. I hadn’t told anyone that. Only Jazz had known, and that was back in seventh grade, when it was still normal if you hadn’t kissed a guy. Ninth grade was different.

  He laughed. “So, uh, who do you know here?”

  “Nobody,” I said. “Andie’s in my homeroom. She invited me. But I don’t really know anyone else.” I was surprised Andie had invited me. I didn’t think she knew who I was until one morning on the way out of class she told me she liked my shorts. I was wearing denim cutoffs. “I couldn’t pull off shorts that short,” she said. “But your legs are so long it works. I can almost see your ass, but it works.”

  I was still learning
how girls talked to each other, how sometimes you couldn’t tell if something was supposed to be a compliment or an insult. I was figuring out my body. I knew my shorts were short but I didn’t have boobs and I thought my legs were nice.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Your hair’s really pretty. Mine won’t get that long.” I was lying. I didn’t know where it came from. I’d never tried to grow my hair that long. Andie smiled, then sighed. “It’s such a pain to brush though.”

  I don’t know, after Jazz there was always this separation between me and any other girls I could have been friends with. It didn’t make sense that you could feel like you existed in a secret world with one other person, that there was some force field around the two of you that wouldn’t let anybody else in, and then one day it could pop and it was as if you’d never even spoken to each other, much less peeled the sunburned skin from each other’s backs or examined the pale tan-line triangles of your bare chests side by side in the bathroom mirror. And I knew it was my fault, but I didn’t know how to fix it or where she was now or what she’d seen that day and I never wanted to know but at the same time I wanted to know it all if it meant she could forget it.

  KJ had moved out of the doorway and was leaning on the counter beside me. “I came with some of the soccer guys,” he said. I scraped at the label on the beer bottle. “Andie and Jackson are kinda going together, and he’s one of my friends on the team, so she told him to bring some people.” I was pretty sure that meant they were having sex but there was no way I could ask that so I just nodded.

  I didn’t know how to talk to guys. I didn’t know how to talk to anyone. I mostly watched TV and drank with my mom at our apartment whenever she was there, which wasn’t much. She was always at the restaurant, working or drinking with her coworkers off the clock. And when I was alone, I was reading library books or rummaging through the fridge, which was always empty and I don’t know why I bothered, or staring at myself in the mirror, appraising my body, wondering when my legs had gotten this long, when my hips had started to hold up my jean shorts.