“A flower doesn’t choose its color, but it controls how it blooms,” Lulu said. Turning to Alice, she demurred, “There’s hope for you yet.”
“Did you think about what we talked about last time? About me coming home?” Alice said, burying herself between the pelts of her mother’s rabbit coat. “I want to come home, Mom. I miss you.”
“Silly goose. What home? What house?” Lulu lifted her dress to show legs bare and unshaven. An old joke between mother and daughter, a minor recompense. “Is it here, this house? Sweet child, there is no home to go home to.”
Alice lunged for her mother’s calf. Drew squares on her mother’s bare leg with her fingers. “This is home to me. You. You. Let me in. Let me in.”
Lulu’s sighs were extravagant. “We talked about this a million times, baby.”
“A million and one. Refresh my memory about why I’m still here. What kind of family is a family you can’t go home to?”
“I don’t have it in me, Alice. Don’t make this any more difficult than it is. I’m here now, right? I come and visit you a few times a month, right? What else is there?”
Alice pulled away, pressed a pillow over her face, and screamed, “FUCKING LEAVE, THEN.”
Lulu gathered her things and said to me, “I don’t know why she insists on acting like a child.”
“Because we are children,” I said.
It looked as if Lulu were on the brink of apology when she said, “You were never children.”
After Lulu left, Alice sat up in bed and said, “See what I mean, G? We can never leave.”
“We’re home now,” I said, feeling a kind of love for her.
Alice’s shoulders quaked. “I fucking hate her. What kind of mother disappears for months at a time and comes back with a new language and a guru? Promise her a payday and she’ll spread like peanut butter.”
I held her tight, as if my pressure would ease out the pain so I could absorb it. Just like Jonah used to do when we were small. Squeeze my hand so hard it hurts, he used to say. I want your pain. All of it.
Over a telephone line I whispered to Jonah, “I love her. You can’t have her. She’s mine. Do you hear me? Mine.”
“When has anything ever been yours?”
“How are they? Mom and Dad?”
“Here’s a lesson for you: don’t worry about snakes in the garden when you’ve got spiders in your bed.”
That night I dreamed of oleander stained yellow, of a belt behind a woman’s neck. Hair that resembled the insides of trees, and bodies that assumed the shape of branches spreading outward.
In the spring, we tore off our T-shirts, rose up from our mattresses, and fled into the night. We took the train into the city, drank pitchers of beer, and feasted on french fries at Jackson Hole and wings slathered in ranch at Brother Jimmy’s. We’d saved up our stomachs for weeks for tonight, and no wing was left abandoned. Alice and I stomped our feet to bad rock songs from the seventies, because this is what we thought we should do. We blew boys in Kelly’s Kitchen, and when we saw Telly and Casper in Kids drink forties out of paper bags in front of Kelly’s, we jumped up, pointed, and said, “I know that place!”
No one ever thought to ask for names. We gave boys numbers of the take-out places we knew from memory.
That night I lost Alice in the Zoo Bar, after one too many bowls of mixed drinks the color of skies. Stumbling out of the bar, I collapsed into bodega flowers and ended up falling asleep on a stoop on Amsterdam Avenue. The next morning, inside a bodega, I asked to use a phone, and ignored the diverted eyes of the family working the register. “No phone,” they said. “This is America,” I said. “Everyone has a fucking phone.” Outside I lay down on the ground and made a snow angel.
There was no snow, only sadness.
I hailed a taxi and asked the driver to take me to the train station. “Which one? You got a station on every block.”
“The big one,” I said. “The one with all the lights.”
Before the taxi driver shook his head, rolled up his window, and sped down the street, he said, “Your face is bleeding.”
It took me four hours to make it back to the dorm, and Alice, who was eating ramen from a hot bowl, said only, “Welcome to the jungle.”
LATE ONE NIGHT, Alice said, “Your brother called. How old is he? He sounds hot.”
Another time, early: “Jonah had me on for an hour. What’s up with his obsession with knees? Kind of pervy, but I like it.”
Today, right now: “Can your brother not call here anymore?”
THERE WAS A piano in the room and I was dancing on top of it. I was on the verge of sixteen and remember someone telling me that I already had the look of a woman whose lipstick had been kissed off one too many times. I remembered Lulu: You got “desperate for love” written all over your face. But I didn’t care (why care?) because cocaine made me feel nothing and everything all at once. I swiveled my hips, knocked my knees, and lifted my skirt until—Stop. That was just the preview, boys. You need to pay for the show.
Alice and I were in the city, in an apartment that spanned a whole floor. We heard about a party in a building outfitted with thick rugs in the lobby and men dressed in crisp navy who once joked with the kids who tracked in mud from soccer practice. The kind of building where, over the years, doormen overlooked those same uptown boys who now sported backpacks filled with glassine bags, riding the elevators until dawn. The dealers made deliveries to the kids who’d grown into smug replicas of their parents, aware of how much money they had and what it could buy.
Someone at the party told me that my legs were oars, and I laughed and said termites had plagued my sticks. “Oh, the fucking itch,” I cried from on top of the piano, and Alice shouted, “Coke bugs.” Scotch was our varnish of choice. My heels left claw marks on the lid.
From a window I saw a woman pushing a cart filled with shopping bags, groceries, and this put me to thinking about home. It was two thirty in the morning when I called Mother, and she answered, all breathy, mouth full of sleep, “Hello, hello,” and I bit down so hard on my lip that it bled, put down the phone, and said, “Goodbye, goodbye.”
A couple soft-knuckled the door, tumbled in. “We need the room,” Kevin Flynn said. As I left, Kevin grabbed my arm and said, “You’re the girl from the piano. There’s room on the bed.”
“I’m the girl from your history class,” I corrected.
“I won’t go down on you,” the girl slurred.
“Who are you kidding? You’ll go down on anyone,” Kevin said. To me: “Let’s make some history, then.”
“I’m good, thanks.”
Kevin shrugged his shoulders and kicked the door shut.
In the hallway a girl pointed to an Ellsworth Kelly drawing and asked, “Is that real?”
A boy responded, “Depends on your point of view.”
The girl wondered if she could take it, if anyone would notice, and her best friend said, “Isn’t your dad, like, a collector?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know what he collects.”
“Accurate,” the boy said.
In another bedroom a bunch of girls with knives said, “Let’s play doctor and nurse. You play the victim.” I thought about Jonah and his pretend friend, Lionel.
In the hallway Alice tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I need to hit the ATM. I’ll be right back.”
Four hours later morning broke, and Alice walked through the door as if no time had passed. Everyone had gone home except for a few girls from downtown who had snuck into the party and spent the night earning a place to put down their heads and rest. Alice opened the fridge and cabinets and stuffed her duffel bag with sturgeon, beef fillets, and jars of imported pesto sauce.
“Why are you taking food?” I asked.
“Bonus payment for tonight’s party favors,” Alice replied, waving me toward the bathroom. “Get some of the lotions. Smell them first. The expensive ones always smell like real flowers.”
“Your dealer owns
a Mercedes.”
“My dealer lives in Spanish Harlem,” Alice corrected. “They can buy all the cars they want, but they could never live here. They’ve never been on a plane. This is what we’re giving them. The feeling of being here.”
So I stole shea body butters imported from Africa, French perfume encased in Baccarat crystal, hairbrushes with leather handles and clumps of fine hair snared between the delicate bristles. I even pinched an ivory canister that held Crest toothpaste.
As we were leaving the apartment, the host walked out of the bedroom. “I’m going to need payment for all that,” he said coolly. “Did you think you could just raid my place and get away with it?”
Alice turned to me and ordered, “On your knees, soldier.”
Over a telephone line I whispered to Jonah, “I hate her.”
“What did I tell you about spiders in your bed?”
“I want some of her hair.”
Lionel: “Now we’re talking.”
IT WAS LATE, or early, depending on how you looked at the situation, but when Jonah phoned I begged, “Please come.”
Alice had gone missing.
“I hear your school is the kind of place where everyone’s stomach looks the same. Is that true?” he said.
“Please come.”
“Are the girls as hot as the brochures say they are?”
“Jonah, please come.” My eyes couldn’t adjust to the light.
“How’s that roommate of yours? The one who smells like yogurt? Don’t get like her,” Jonah said. “Picked clean.”
When Jonah arrived that weekend they’d found Alice, or parts of her, in an apartment in Spanish Harlem. She’d been strangled by what police believed to be a women’s belt. I had no doubt that the police took away the men in their silver cars and kept the money and coke for themselves. Pretty good work for a day’s pay, I imagined them saying. Lulu was somewhere in upstate New York, adjusting her levels.
Outside, the grass that had once dried to straw was now verdant and damp. The evening sky burned gold and violet, while the fireflies and hummingbirds flittered through the trees pregnant with bloom, determined to puncture the pollinated air and fly through it. That year, we plucked lilacs off the trees and plugged them into glass iced tea bottles, ignoring the withering. Ducks journeyed up the lawn from the nearby ravine, only to be rebuffed by the scuttling footfalls of the boys playing lacrosse. The boys waved their sticks, creating wind while the birds lowered their beaks and skittered to a run. On the lawn us girls hawked, puffed our cheeks, and curled our hair around our fingertips when we said, “You guys are so mean.”
Outside and in, our world revolved around the boys.
The way that Jonah leaned, stood, sat, filled the room with what I didn’t know or couldn’t articulate. But it was cold, desolate, and precise. He picked up objects and placed them down without even looking at them, as if he were taking inventory instead of observing. As if he were counting. As if he made the room his, in the way that he made everything his.
That bird in his hand, thrashing. The tweezers tucked under a thigh.
Jonah smelled of lilacs. The lotion, not the flowers, but it was hard to tell.
Before he left, he said, “I’ll get you home, I promise.”
“What about Mom? Won’t she be pissed? She still blames me for the accident. And Dad . . .” I said.
“What about him?” Jonah said.
A week later Jonah held me too close. “I missed your hair, the wreck of it,” he said. To our father, he said, “Tell your daughter how much you missed her.”
“I’m sorry to hear about your friend,” our father said. His voice was a soft stutter. “What they did to her. I heard they found parts . . .”
“Didn’t I warn you?” Jonah said.
“It was one measly murder. Not enough to justify pulling her out of school and wasting a semester of tuition,” my mother snapped.
“That place was no home for her,” our father said. Not once did he glance at Jonah.
“That girl was a room with no windows, only walls,” Jonah said.
I think of Lulu, her animal skins, gold bracelets, and rules. “That girl’s name was Alice.”
WOMEN, DON’T BREAK
2013, 2003–2005
WHEN I WAS small I wanted a pony but never got one. Instead, my mother purchased a horse head attached to a long stick and told me to ride: “Wild animals you can’t control, but this toy, this, you can hold in your hands. You can make it go anywhere you want it to. Do you hear me, Gillian?”
“I see,” I’d said.
A teacher once told me that my handwriting was almost confident.
I’ve kept that pony for over twenty-five years. Hid it in my dorm-room closet behind a stack of empty shoeboxes. There are stores that sell designer shoeboxes to give the suggestion of a kind of life. Now the pony is under my bed. A lover once found it while he was tying a shoe. “Whatever gets you off,” he said. I mean, this was a man who once confided to me that he made love to an inflatable doll on three separate occasions. Sober. We fucked for a year.
I’ve never been good at letting things go.
When I moved to California, I had problems with the water. I started to miss hurricanes; I cried out for storms. I only watched television shows that promised hard rain. I fell asleep to videos of hail and wondered why all the famous storms are named after women. An air robbed of moisture does things to you. A constellation of red, blistery bumps covered my chest, arms, and back. The insides of my mouth tasted of rusted pipes. I brushed my teeth with tap water and my lover laughed and said, “You’re just moving the metal around, baby.”
My brother Jonah laughs. He lives in New York but he comes here often. “You’re worried about water when you live in a place where the ground sometimes rearranges itself?”
“Don’t you find it strange that everyone talks about the water?” Even the act of drinking water requires a plan, a filtration system.
“There are worse things.”
After six months my skin returned to its normal state.
“In New York you can drink water right out of the faucet,” Jonah says.
“I like it here,” I say. “Everything, including your freedom, requires a plan.”
WE MAKE LOVE, quietly, while his wife lies unconscious in the next room. The meds have seized her, and she drifts in between life and a darkness that resembles death. Some days she’s lucid; others, like this one, she keeps calling me Kate. Keeps telling me to leave. Let me sleep. Go away, I never loved you. I did this. I did this to you. It’s my fault. I hate you. I know what you do while I sleep. I maybe loved you once.
I shake my head. Poor woman. You don’t know me. You don’t know about the horse head I’ve hidden under your bed.
While James is fucking me, I hum a lullaby my mother once sang to me when I was a child. “Mommy’s home,” I say. My fingers spider down his back—real slow like, so he can feel it. He puts his hand over my mouth. I’m loud. I bite him. Wild animals you can’t control.
“You’re not making this easy.”
“Your dying wife is in the other room. You made this what it is. Suddenly you’re too cheap to afford a hotel room?”
“It’s not like you have a home we can go to,” James snaps.
After, I pull on a T-shirt that reads, “Future Corpse.”
“I’m worried about you,” he says. “You look like you never sleep. When do you sleep? You’re out all night for days at a time, and during the day . . .”
“Since when are you concerned about my health? I’m fine, just fine. You need to be focusing on your wife and your daughter. How is your daughter? The one who bakes the cakes—what’s her name again?”
“I’m too tired to play this game. Why are you doing this to her?”
“The cancer patient in the other room? I don’t know her any more than you do, James. But hey, if you want me to go back to playing Kate, the dutiful daughter, I can do that. That’s a game I can play. I know
how much you miss her.”
Whatever gets you off.
I get up and walk across the room and out the door in nothing but my T-shirt. I bring his wife a glass of water because that’s what I assume a good daughter does—brings a dying woman something to drink. I fill the glass directly from the tap because why bother? It’s not as if she’s straight enough to notice a little fluoride. If I were her I’d drink the whole glass because when you’re about to die why not live dangerously?
I go into his stepdaughter’s room. Sometimes I like being in here when she’s not. The sadness is palpable; I feel like I’m not alone, like she’s here with me. There’s not much here in terms of decoration: a blue curtain, a fringe rug, and stacks of books written by dead men. I flip through photo albums and I notice there are no pictures of her from when she was a baby. It was as if all the years before ten ceased to exist, as if she just appeared in California, aged ten, wearing a twinset.
On the windowsill leans a frame: it’s a photo of Kate and Ellie when they were younger. A mother and daughter at the beach, but Kate is out of focus—it was as if the photographer wanted to blur her out of the frame. I remove the photo from the frame and, on the back, written in small script, a name: Tim. Underneath: Remember him. I curl the photograph in my hand.
James is dressed and in the kitchen. A man on the television warns of a tsunami, aftershocks from an earthquake in Chile. Afterward, a woman recounts a study that reveals that within the next thirty years an earthquake will swallow us whole. I laugh because we’ve heard this before. Brush fires in the canyons, the blustery Santa Anas blowing hot from the desert, and tectonic plates rearranging themselves like some sort of jigsaw puzzle—the story of our impending catastrophic ruin is common. When I press the photo into James’s hand, he looks at it as if it’s far more terrifying than the images projected onto a television screen.
“I’ll play Kate. I’ll play nice, if that’s what you want me to do.”
“Why are you doing this? You’re acting like a child again. You’re not fifteen and this is not that house.”
Follow Me into the Dark Page 4
