by Lauren Groff
* * *
—
She woke to a hard rapping next to her ear and struggled up through sleep into darkness. She turned on her penlight to see a groin in stretched black fabric and a shining leather belt hung with a gun in a holster and an enormous flashlight.
Cop, she thought. Penis of death, penis of light.
Open up, the policeman said, and she said, Yes, sir, and slid over the backseat and rolled down the window.
What are you smiling at? he said.
Nothing, sir, she said, and turned off her penlight.
You been here a week, he said. I been watching you.
Yes, sir, she said.
It’s illegal, he said. Now, I get a kid once in a while doesn’t want to pay for a motel, okay. I get some old hippies in their vans. But you’re a young girl. Hate to see you get hurt. There are bad guys everywhere, you know?
I know, she said. I keep my doors locked.
He snorted. Yeah, well, he said. Then he paused. You run away from your man? That the story? There’s a safe house for ladies up in town. I can get you in.
No, she said. There’s no story. I guess I’m on vacation from my life.
Well, he said, and the looseness in his voice was gone. Get on out of here. Don’t let me see you back, or I’ll take you in for vagrancy.
* * *
—
She spent a few days on a different beach where people drove their trucks onto the sand and pumped out music until their batteries ran down. She dug again into the wagon’s seats to find change for a candy bar but failed, then she walked the miles into town to consider what she should do, her legs shaking by the time she arrived.
The buildings on the town square looked like old Florida—the tall porches with fans, the tin roofs—but everything was made of a dense plastic in shades of beige. There was a fountain in the center: a squat frog spitting up water and change scattered on the blue tiles under the water. She sat on the edge of the fountain and watched the shoppers in the boutiques and the people eating ice cream cones.
At one corner of the square stood a small brick church flanked by blooming crape myrtles. She didn’t notice the people gathering in front until they began to emerge with hands full of styrofoam clamshells and juice packs. Some were stringy, greasy, the familiar life-beaten people who lived half visibly at the edge of the university town she’d come from. But there were also construction workers in hard hats, mothers hurrying away with kids in their wakes.
She wanted to stand. To be in the line, to get the food. Her body, though, wouldn’t move. In the twilight, a family passed, and she thought how she had once been this blonde toddler on her tricycle, singing to herself while her parents walked behind her. How sudden the disturbance had been! Her father dead when she was ten, the struggle with money through high school, her mother marrying in exhaustion only to fold herself entirely away. The one safe place the girl had had left was school. But she’d been too careful in the end, unable to take the necessary scholarly risks, and they had withdrawn even that from her.
She sat like a second frog on the edge of the fountain, hunched over her hunger, until the clock clicked to an impossibly late hour and she was alone. She rolled up her jeans and stepped into the water. She felt along the bottom with her feet until she came upon a coin, and dipped her arm up to her shoulder, but almost all the change was glued to the tile. By the time she had gone entirely around, she had gathered only a small handful. When she peered at the coins in the dim light from the streetlamp, she found they were mostly pennies. Still, she went around again. She saw herself from a great distance, a woman stooping in knee-deep water for someone else’s wishes.
Most days, she found food—bread and bruised fruit—heaped, clean, in a dumpster behind a specialty grocer. She hid the station wagon at the far end of a supermarket parking lot, next to a retention pond and shielded by the low branches of a camphor tree. The smell entered her dreams at night, and she’d wake to a slow green sway of branches, as if underwater. There was a Baudelaire poem this reminded her of, but it had been erased from her memory. She wondered what else was gone, the Goethe, the Shakespeare, the Montale. The sun was bleaching it all to dust; her hunger was eating it up. It was a cleansing, she decided. If pretty words couldn’t save her, then losing them, too, was all for the best.
* * *
—
She was baking on the beach when a leaf slid up over her stomach. She caught idly at it and found that it wasn’t a leaf at all but a five-dollar bill.
That night, she went into the poolside showers of an apartment complex and washed herself carefully. When she caught sight of herself naked in the mirror, she could see the ribs of her upper chest and the pulse in the curve of her hip bone. But she blow-dried her hair and put it into a ponytail and applied makeup that she’d bought a few years ago. She no longer looked like herself: diligent, plump, prim. She looked like a surfer girl or a sorority sister, one of those quivering dewy creatures she had always silently disliked.
She walked three miles to a beach bar, listening to the ocean break itself again and again. The place was full when she came up through the back door, the huge televisions blaring a football game. Once, she would have been invested in the game, if only because it was the lingua franca of the southern town, the way to put a freshman comp class at ease, to converse with a dean’s vapid wife. But now it seemed silly to her, young men grinding into one another, war games muted with padding.
She ordered the dollar-special beer and gave the bartender another dollar for a tip. His fingers brushed hers when he handed her the change, and she was startled at the warmth of his skin. She peeled the label of her beer and took deep breaths.
Someone climbed onto the stool beside hers, and she looked at him when he ordered two gin and tonics. He was a sweet-looking sandy boy with large red ears, the kind of student who always got a B‒ in her classes, mostly on effort alone. He slid one of the drinks toward her shyly, and when he began to speak, he didn’t stop. He was a junior up north but had had to take a semester off and was working in his mother’s real estate office for now, which really pissed off the old agents there, because there were few enough commissions right now, real estate going to shit in this shitty, shitty time. And on and on. After three drinks, she was drunker than she’d ever let herself be. She wondered, as he spoke, what had happened to make him take a semester off. Drugs? A hazing scandal? Bad grades? When they stopped on the walk to his place and he pressed her shoulders against the cold metal of a streetlight and kissed her with touching earnestness, she felt the soft hair at the base of his neck and thought he’d probably had a nervous breakdown. He kissed like a boy prone to anxiety attacks.
But she liked him, and his apartment was clean and pretty: she could sense the hand of an overbearing mother in its furnishings. Before he touched her, he looked at her naked body for a long time, blinking. She saw herself, then, as he did: the clean white of her bikini pressed into her skin, the eroticism of the contrast. In gratitude, she came toward him.
But afterward, the softness of the bed was overwhelming. As the boy slept, she went to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. It was so full, the abundance stilled her. She ate a slice of cold pizza standing in the glow, opened a jar of pickles and ate three, ripped a hunk of cheddar from the block with her fingers and gobbled it down. She didn’t see the boy standing in the doorway until she reached for the orange juice. Then she noticed the pale gleam of his T-shirt, and she closed her eyes, unable to look at him.
She could hear him walking toward her and steeled herself for recrimination. But he touched the small of her back and said a soft Oh, honey; and this was infinitely worse.
* * *
—
A hurricane developed over the Caribbean, but only its edges lashed the shore. Still, during the scream and blow, the camphor rattled its branches against the top of the car, and the wagon
shook so hard she was afraid the metal would twist and the glass would break. The retention pond overflowed and water licked up to the hubcaps. She lay as quietly as she could and listened and watched: she was a thin shell of glass and steel from the raw nerve at the center of herself. She felt the storm come closer, charging near; she waited with a painful breathless patience. But before it arrived, she fell asleep.
* * *
—
She called her mother on Thanksgiving, but her stepfather answered and said her mother was in bed again, under the weather. Not that she cared. They’d given up on her coming home, but couldn’t she call her damn mother once a month?
She held the receiver up to the highway and let him speak himself out, and in a pause, she said to tell her mother that she loved her and would call again soon. She sat for a while on a dune, shivering in the cold wind. The ocean was blank and inexpressive, withholding sympathy. At last, she was numbed enough that she could walk to the town and stand in the long line outside the church. Today they were serving people in seatings, and the line moved very slowly.
Most of the people at the table looked normal. Across from her was a family, the mother with a chic black haircut and tattoos across her collarbone, the father with an artful mullet, the two little girls with barrettes in their bangs. Next to her was an enormous woman whose flesh pressed up to hers, firm and warm. Nobody spoke. There was a soup course—homemade minestrone with good bread—then the turkey course with canned everything: cranberries, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, beans. And last, there were homemade pecan and pumpkin pies with coffee.
When the woman serving their table bent over to clear the pie plates, the large lady grasped her gloved hand. They all looked up to see the serving woman’s startled face under her shower cap. Thank you, the large lady said, that was goooood, and the little girls laughed. The girl expected awkwardness, a hurrying away, but the serving woman briefly laid her cheek atop the lady’s head and gave her a squeeze, and both women closed their eyes and leaned closer in.
* * *
—
It had been a rare warm day, and she’d built wind walls out of sand and soaked the last of the season’s sunshine into her skin. Now she dropped her towel and book and water, and stared in wonder at the station wagon. All the doors were open, her things spilling out. Her car had been gutted; her things were entrails. The hood was open, the engine gone. The tires were gone, the hubcaps gone, the front seats gone. Inside, a strong stench of urine: someone had pissed in the glove box. The guitar was gone, the camping stove, the tent, her childhood stuffed turtle, her winter jacket. Middlemarch, of all fucking things, gone. Her backpack had a long slit in it.
She gathered up what she could—the sleeping bag, Paradise Lost, some clothes, a tarp. She found some dental floss and a needle, and sewed up the backpack. Then she took the registration from the glove box and ripped it up—wet, it tore easily—and tossed the license plate into the retention pond, where it floated on the duckweed for a moment before it sank.
How light she thought she had been before. How truly light she was now.
She should be leaving anyway—it was too cold now, with the wind off the ocean. There were Santas in the store windows, in piles of fake snow.
Out on A1A, the cars screamed by her and threw exhaust in her face. She stuck out her thumb, and a tan sedan rolled to a stop. The driver was pale and nervous, and somewhere inside her alarm bells began to ring, but she found she didn’t care to listen. He said he was going back to the university town, and she thought of her ex, her friends, her fall from safety. She found she didn’t care about those things, either.
She could feel the ocean pulling at her back but didn’t turn to say goodbye. It had failed to do what she had longed for it to do; it had been indifferent, after all. Over the inland waterway, with its tiny islands and corrugated bridge, into the palmetto scrub. Somewhere along a stretch of road bordered by pines in strict formation, the man put a hand on her knee and squinted toward the empty asphalt ahead. She gently removed his hand, and he didn’t try again. He turned on the radio, and they listened to sticky love ballads. In town, he dropped her at the downtown plaza and squealed away, to the loud derision of two old men at the bus stop. They grinned at her and both blew pink bubbles with their gum and one by one let them pop.
* * *
—
Just before the public library closed for the night, she rode the elevator to the top floor and went into the grand stained-glass conference room set like a crown at the top of the building. She’d discovered an unlocked closet behind a leaning blackboard, barely long enough to hold her body in its sleeping bag. In the dark of the closet, she ate what she found during the day and listened to the library empty out. It was orange season, and she plucked satsumas for breakfast and spat the pips into the road.
She neglected to call her mother for Christmas or New Year’s. When she tried to read during the day, the words lost their meaning and floated loosely in her eyes.
* * *
—
She didn’t make it to the library in time one evening and spent the night shivering in her light jean jacket. She was walking by a club that had just closed when a cluster of undergraduates in strapless dresses tottered by, fingering their cell phones. She recognized one of them, a girl from her comp-lit class last year. She’d been a frightened, silent thing who’d earned her C‒. No matter how hard she was drilled, “its” and “it’s” had eluded the girl. Tonight, if she and the girl came face-to-face, the girl would look through her former instructor, not seeing her in this worn, dirty woman; and she, whose words had once lashed, would have nothing to say.
Its, it’s, she said aloud now. Who cares?
A man stacking the chairs in front of the patio area heard her and laughed. Twits, he agreed.
She leaned against the railing and watched him work. He was a skinny, short brown man and exceptionally fast: he’d already rolled up the rubber mats and was hosing down the bricks when she realized he was still talking to her. I’m telling you, he was saying, sillier and sillier each damn day, filling up those heads with tweeters and scooters and facebooks and starbooks and shit. He looked up at her and grinned. His front four teeth were gone, and it gave him the mischievous air of a six-year-old. Name’s Eugene, but everyone calls me Eugene-Euclean. I clean, right? I got three of these clubs to set right before morning, so’s I can’t stop to chat.
Okay, she said, and took a step, but he meant that he couldn’t stop; he could still chat. This land, he told her, was full of living twits and unsettled spirits, both. The spirits were loud and unhappy, and filled the place with evil. All them dead Spanish missionaries and snakebit Seminoles and starved-to-death Crackers and shit. He, Eugene-Euclean, came down from Atlanta near on four years back and got infected with the spirits and they were inside him and he couldn’t find his way to leave.
By now, they were inside the booze-stinking club, and Eugene had poured her a glass of cranberry juice. He began to mop the floor with a bleach solution so strong it made her eyes water. He looked up at her and stopped, struck by a thought. I like you, he said. You keep your words in tight.
Thanks, Eugene, she said.
I could use some help, he said. Three clubs is hard to clean alone by morning-time come. You could do bathrooms, stuff like that. You got you a job?
No, she said.
He looked at her shrewdly and said, Fifty bucks Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights, twenty bucks other nights. Monday off.
She blinked at the empty bucket he thrust into her hands. Partner, he said.
* * *
—
There was a sensation in cleaning that she used to get in her other lifetime when the books she was reading were so compelling they carried her through the hours. Words were space carved out of life, warm and safe. Polishing windows to perfect clarity, scrubbing porcelain, working caustic chemicals
into the tiles until they gleamed like teeth; all this detached her mind from herself. She grew hard muscles in her skinny arms.
In the mornings, she would walk into the cold and feel herself wrung out. Eugene-Euclean sometimes bought her breakfast, and they’d sit, stinking of chemicals, in their booth, surrounded by the smells of warm grease and hot coffee. She wanted to laugh with him, to tell him of the horror of her mother’s house when she was little, the cockroaches and the dirt-crusted linoleum, how strange it was that she was cleaning now; but Eugene spoke so much she had no need to say anything. He’d tell her about this talking dog when he was a kid, or he’d describe his moments of illumination, when the world slowed and the Devil spoke in his ear until he was chased away by the brightness that grew inside Eugene and bathed the world in light.
* * *
—
She took a room by the week in a squat concrete motel sticking out over the highway. It was called Affordable—Best Price—Comfortable, but she had to borrow some chemicals and rags from Eugene to make the bathroom usable. She liked the sound of the trucks rumbling past and the steady rhythms of her neighbors’ voices and the boys who hung out at the roasted-chicken place next door, with their swooping boasts and hoots of derision.
One morning, she was walking home to the motel when she saw a familiar bicycle at the coffee shop where she used to grade papers. She looked in the window, hiding her face with her baseball cap. Two of her former friends sat at a table, both frowning into their laptops. How fat they looked, how pink. They were nursing their plain black coffees, and she remembered, with a surge of ugliness, how they all used to complain that they were too poor for lattes. How rich they had been. It was a kind of wealth you don’t know you have until you stand shivering outside in the morning, watching what you used to be. One of her friends, the man, sensing eyes upon him, slowly looked up. A knot pulled tight in her gut, but when he looked past her to a sleek young woman gliding by on a bicycle, the knot frayed and broke apart.
