Donna Has Left the Building

by Susan Jane Gilman

  I stopped hanging out with my crowd. I stopped playing guitar. I stopped reading books. I took on more shifts at Bob’s Big Boy. Since I didn’t have my driver’s license yet, I could mostly work only lunches. Afterward, I’d bike home, then steal half a six-pack or so from my dad’s cooler and walk along the back roads—drinking one can, then another, the plastic collar looped around my wrist like a bracelet, the beer cans dangling like a giant, aluminum charm.

  At the edge of town beyond the water tower was a single set of railroad tracks and an abandoned brick signal house. It was on a slight hillock rising gently above fields of wild grass. From it, you could see across southeast Michigan toward Ohio.

  Trains never stopped in our township. They just barreled through. I sat beside the signal house and stared at the vectors of silver vanishing into the horizon. I wished they would carry me off to another dimension in time and space entirely, or that the fields themselves would part like the Red Sea, then swallow me up in their loam until I biodegraded like cardboard. Sometimes, I looked at my hand, and it didn’t even seem to be a part of my body anymore. “This is your hand. This is your hand,” I’d tell myself, feeling even more disembodied as I said this, seeing it not as a hand at all but some weird appendage. When I heard a train whistle, I’d place the empty beer cans on the track, watching them crush and flatten beneath the blur of the train.

  One day, I decided to lie down on the tracks myself.

  It was July; the air was thick and sultry. The ground between the railroad ties glittered with broken glass. You could always hear the approaching trains from miles away and feel the rails begin to vibrate long before they drew near. I lay in the crickety quiet among the weeds with my shoulder blades and my coccyx pressed against the rails like some cartoon damsel in distress. Closing my eyes, I imagined a locomotive bearing down on me—the spirit of my mother watching as I was pulverized.

  “Whoa. What the fuck?”

  I sat up abruptly. A guy hovered over me in jeans and boots, his hair a dark corona. With the sun behind him, I had trouble seeing his face, but as he shifted above me, I recognized him as Rooster’s brother, Zack.

  Nobody likes getting caught in the throes of their own private fantasy. And this was like masturbation in reverse, a willing myself to pain. And of all the people!

  “Jesus, I’m just chilling.” I shrugged, trying to hide my embarrassment.

  Zack cocked his head. He was wearing a T-shirt reading BUDDY’S B-B-Q, and his grimy jeans hung so low on his hips, I could see the struts of his pelvic bones. “On the railroad tracks?” He seemed to consider this. “Wow.”

  “Hey, it’s a free country.” I sounded more defensive than I wanted. Then suddenly, I was overcome again by an eerie sense that we knew each other from somewhere else. “This is my spot, okay?”

  He grinned. “Well, I hate to break it to you, but this is my spot, too, actually. In fact, I’m, like, the mayor here. No, better yet, I’m, like, ha, the king.”

  I gave him a look.

  “I am, I am.” He motioned grandly to the abandoned brick signal house with its tiny rusted, paneless windows. “Check it out. I’ve got a whole setup. Sleeping bag. Boom box. Refreshments.” He was holding a half-empty pint bottle of Bacardi, I saw now, and he raised it proudly in a toast. “Hear, hear.” As he smiled, his hair fell into his eyes again. He wobbled a little.

  “You sleep out here?”

  He snorted. “Only when my stepfather’s being an asshole. No, wait, wait. Excuse me. Allow me to rephrase that: Only when I get sick of my stepfather’s bullshit, and him beating up my mom, and her taking his side even after I fucking stand up for her and get my nose busted for giving a shit.”

  “Your stepfather broke your nose?”

  “What? No! Of course not. No way. Not broken. Jeez.” He flexed his bicep. “Look at me. I’m totally pumped. I’m practically the Incredible Hulk.” Frankly, his muscle did not look that impressive to me. But there was something boyish and poignant and transparent about his braggadocio. I found it enormously touching.

  “You know, my dad—” I started to say.

  “Okay, Move over, missy.” Zack nudged me playfully with the toe of his boot. “Whoops.” With some difficulty, he lowered himself down beside me. The warm skin of his upper arm pressed lightly against mine. We were sitting side by side on the rail now, our backsides balanced on the strip of metal. Reaching behind him, he pulled a handful of petals off some blue asters bobbing beside the track and threw them over me like confetti. “We’re havin’ a party,” he sang. “Ow.” Patting his ass, he shifted around. “Okay. These are even more uncomfortable than they look. These are not designed for human recreation.”

  I giggled. “You’re drunk.”

  He glanced at the fresh beer cans lying beside me. “Oh. Ha-ha. And you’re not?”

  I motioned to his pint. Handing it over, he let his eyes rest on me. I could sense his desire registering. Grabbing the bottle, I threw my head back as sensually as I could, closing my eyes, swallowing luxuriantly in long, confident gulps. When I finished, I dragged the back of my wrist as slowly as possible across my lips.

  “Wow. The lady knows how to drink.” Admiringly, he took another swallow, then sputtered and coughed. “Whoa”—he pounded himself on the chest—“So, do you have, like, a name?”

  “Donna.”

  “No kidding. Is that short for, like, ‘Belladonna’?”

  “Nope. Just ‘Donna.’”

  “Nuh-uh.” He shook his head vigorously. In the sunlight, his long, thick hair glistened like ale. “You should totally have people call you Belladonna instead. ‘Belladonna’ is way better. It means ‘beautiful woman,’ you know? And also, I think, poison, ha-ha. Or wait. Maybe a flower. Something, though.”

  “So what are you telling me?” I said teasingly. “That I’m beautiful? Or that I’m deadly?”

  He squinted out across the fields. “Donna is just so—blah. So dishwater.” He must have realized how insulting this sounded, because he added quickly, “And you are so not a Donna. You’re a total Belladonna.” In a deliberately cartoonish way, he looked me up and down again and wiggled his eyebrows. “Totally. I mean, look, it’s the same for me, okay? ‘Zachary’? Fuck. That sounds like some farty old car dealer. ‘Zack’ is way, way cooler. ‘Zack’ is a saxophone player. I’ve even started spelling it without the ‘c’ and, this is the best part, a double ‘k.’ Just Z-A-K-K! One note, one syllable, superfast. Like, pow! Whap!” He mimed cracking a whip. “Bam! Shazaam!”

  “Shazaam has two syllables.”

  “Oh my God, ha-ha, you’re right!” He bent over and slapped the ground beside him. “Two syllables! Two syllables! That is so funny! Pow! Bam! Zakk!”

  The rails beneath us began to vibrate softly like an electric toothbrush. We could hear a mournful faraway owlish hooooooohoooo.

  “You play the saxophone?” I handed him back the bottle. I wasn’t used to drinking straight rum. We’d always mixed it with Coke.

  “Oh, big-time. And I’m good, I’m telling you. Really innovative. I’m like, what’s-his-name. That black guy.”

  “Charlie Parker?”

  “Yeah. Like him. Totally.”

  Another prolonged train whistle echoed in the distance, louder this time. Zack glanced down at the space between his legs, the railroad ties beneath them. His jeans, I saw, were shredding at the knees. “Once I get my sax out of hock, I’ll play you something.”

  “I play guitar,” I volunteered.

  “Yeah? Are you, like, a Stevie Nicks chick? Ha. I can totally see that! The black lace. With a shawl. The boots.”

  “Ugh, please. Stevie Nicks? Hell no. More like Joan Jett, baby.”

  “Ooh.” He said appreciatively. “So you’re hard-core.”

  I grabbed the bottle and took a swig. “I am hard-core, baby,” I announced. “I am punk rock.” I don’t know why I kept saying “baby” all of a sudden. I’d never used it when I spoke. But I liked the way it sounded now c
oming out of my mouth, shiny and hard like enamel. I liked the way it made him grin at me.

  “So where’s your pink hair, then?”

  “Where’s your pink hair then?”

  A dark speck appeared in the distance. A whistle bleated.

  “I’ll dye mine if you dye yours.” Zack’s breath smelled like candy: rum and licorice and something citrusy. Beneath us, the rails were shaking now, the whistle hooting more insistently.

  “So, what do you think?” He glanced at the black pinpoint growing steadily bigger. “You inclined to move?”

  He flopped his arm chummily around my shoulder and drew me closer. Switching the bottle from one hand to the other, he took another sip, then pressed the rim to my lips. I gulped dutifully. I could smell his warm skin, feel his hair against my forehead. Blinking at him, I no longer saw one of him anymore, but two, the original and another misaligned copy, as if on tracing paper that had shifted. I felt emboldened now, invincible. He’d said it himself: Belladonna. I was no longer Donna, but a far more sophisticated, desirable creature, a deadly, dangerous flower.

  I gave him my most provocative smile. “How low can you go?” I sang—I don’t know why, it made no sense. I said coyly, “You scared?” My heart was pounding furiously now, and some tiny part of my sober brain tucked away somewhere—what had they taught us in Biology class?—was it the amygdala? The hypothalamus?—was frantically transmitting to me in a distorted, fuzz-box voice, What the fuck are you doing? But I wanted to impress him, dare him, challenge him; I wanted to be the wildest girl he’d ever met.

  His hooded eyes were fawn-colored, impossibly tender. He leaned into me. “Okay, then.” He took a deep breath. “All right. Wow. So then we’re doing this, then.”

  Drawing me even closer toward him, as if to kiss me, he jammed his hand beneath my armpit, waggling his fingers. “Tickle, tickle!” he shouted.

  “Jesus!” I leapt up, flailing. “What the fuck?”

  “Bwhahahahahaha!” He lay half over the edge of the rail, hunched over, laughing so hard he was gasping. I don’t know why, but I swiped at him then, catching him under his chin with my fingers. “Tickle, tickle!” I yelled back. Laughing insanely, he rolled over the rail to escape me, bits of dried grass matted to the back of his T-shirt. As he tumbled down into a shallow ditch, the ground shook volcanically. A whistle shrieked. “Oh shit!” I jumped back into what felt like a wind tunnel and fell into the grass.

  The train tore past, a violent blur of metal, its velocity whipping the air so fiercely it felt like repeated slaps to my face. The blood pounding in my ears merged with the thunder of the engine. An endless smear of clacking boxcars, blood-brown and rust-red and dark green flashed by and by and by for what seemed like a very long time. When it finally receded, the silence in its wake was jarring. All I could hear by the side of the tracks was my own breath, coming in little yelps.

  I was almost surprised to see Zack still standing in the thicket on the other side of the track, his legs rooted wide apart now, his arms thrown back as if he’d just relinquished something heavy. He was panting so hard, I could see the logo on his T-shirt, BUDDY’S B-B-Q, rising and falling.

  “Whoa. That was fucking intense.”

  I laughed. “Oh my God. That was awesome!”

  He stepped across the rails toward me. “Jesus Christ, my heart, it’s going like—feel that.” Yanking my hand, he mashed it against his chest beneath his T-shirt. An electric shock shot through the plates of muscle and skin directly into my palm. He felt pulsating, animal. I did not want to remove my hand. I did not want to stop touching him. Ever.

  “You feel that? You feel how fast it’s still beating? Fuck.” He gazed at me in astonishment. “Woman, you are insane.”

  Soon, it was like drugs. Maybe that first teenage love always is. Soon, seeing Zack was all I wanted to do, and when I wasn’t with him, I felt bereft and jittery and crazed with hunger. I’d be in Trigonometry or practicing guitar, but all I could think about was Zack Phelps. Checking the clock every five minutes to meet by the lockers. Calling him on the pay phone at the gas station during his break. Sleeping in his BUDDY’S B-B-Q T-shirt with its intoxicating Zack scent. Doing ecstasy with Zack, cracking each other up making “monkey mouths” with orange slices, daring each other to leap up on the hood of a stranger’s Buick or to kick in the windows of a derelict shed in Inkster just because we felt like it. Zack wheeling me crazily around Safeway in a shopping cart, terrorizing the elderly shoppers, eating an entire bag of Doritos before reaching the cashier. Him holding up the phone to the radio and singing along with Billy Idol to me, “Gonna spend my life makin’ love to you.” Catty girls at school telling me, “You know Zack’s been hooking up with, like, three other girls,” and Zack and I fighting, then laughing and deciding that everyone else was just jealous of us: How could they not be?

  Us kissing, his fingers raking through my hair, the sleepy way his eyelids dropped as he got aroused. The two of us tangled on his puffy sleeping bag in the thicket by the signal house, his head between my legs, then his pelvis, the way he’d writhe above me like a lion caught in a trap. Good God: Nobody ever told me how beautiful boys could be, how leonine and sculpted. You were supposed to be reticent and coy with them, but I’d love to run my hands over the brackets of his hips and grab the indentations where his thighs met his ass. Also, he was the first guy I ever came with—which I’d never thought possible—it usually seemed to take so much patience and stamina, even by myself—plus the precision, really, of a safecracker—and with the few boys I’d hooked up with before—it had just felt like so much lurching and tearing and I’d always faked it. But Zack’s wildness, his abandon—coupled with his appetites, his willingness to do anything—“Goddamn, Bella, I love the way you taste!” he’d sometimes howl. “You feel fucking amazing!”—made me forget about worrying whether anything about me was icky or gross—and gave me permission to wholly unleash myself.

  Oh, I was such a teenage girl. It was textbook: Every time we had sex, I marked it with a little purple heart in the corner of my datebook. A pink star, too, for all the times he went down on me.

  And the daydreams.

  Tina Turner. Annie Lennox. Patti Smith. Debbie Harry. Kim Gordon—blah blah. Almost every great rock chick has been coupled with someone in her band. It’s just the way it happens. Playing music is such a mind-meld—your central nervous systems fuse. In my fantasies, I started to picture Zack and me as this great rock romance.

  For his birthday, I took all my tips from Bob’s Big Boy that I was supposed to be saving for a car—or college—and used them to retrieve his saxophone from the pawnshop in Inkster. “I’m sorry this is not, like, new,” I said. When he saw it, though—well, I’d never seen a boy weep before. “My God. Belladonna,” he whispered hoarsely, pressing his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose, his slender shoulders heaving.

  Unfortunately, Zack played the saxophone as if he were trying to inflate it.

  “You like that? You like that?” he’d say, blowing a series of discordant, earsplitting notes.

  “Wow,” I’d say after a moment. “That’s really, um, different, babe.”

  “I know, right? At first, I thought needed a new reed, but then the sound was just, like, totally raw and real, right? It’s like, heavy metal saxophone! I’m inventing, like, a whole new genre!”

  Still, when I rejoined Toxic Shock Syndrome in Ann-Marie’s basement that autumn, the others welcomed him without comment. I supposed it was because we were a punk band: Who cared if Zack sucked? (Though more likely, it was because Zack’s presence meant that Rooster came around more and gave us free drugs.)

  Zack was quickly as besotted with the idea of us as this hot rock couple as I was. We liked to lie on my bed sometimes and stare up at the dusty ceiling fan and talk about how famous we were going to be. We even practiced poses together in the mirror for whenever Annie Leibovitz came to photograph us for the cover of Rolling Stone.

  “What do
you think?” Zack would say, gathering his long hair. “Back like this, or loose in my face? And shirtless, right?”

  And I would come up beside him, in nothing but my lacy little pink panties, and he’d yank me around in front of him, and wrap his newly tattooed forearm around my waist, and push my hair aside, exposing my pearly neck, and devour it, his hands cupping my breasts, until I began to moan. And then he would freeze us there, right there, young and muscled, entwined on the brink of ecstasy, and point to our reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of my bedroom door and say, “That’s it. Just like that. Look how fucking hot we are.”

  For three years, Zack and I were on-and-off, on-and-off, like a faulty neon bar sign. We’d break up in that awful, recriminatory, manic-depressive sort of way—full of screaming scenes in Burger King and parking lots, public accusations and CDs being flung out car windows and late-night sobbing from pay phones—real class acts, both of us. But then I’d find some lame excuse to call him (Hey, I was just wondering, do you happen to have that bootleg New Order album we once talked about?) or he would lurk around Bob’s Big Boy, waylaying me at the end of my shift. It spooled on and on, even after I went away to Ann Arbor for college—nearly right up until the time I met Joey, in fact.

  And yet it was that image of us in front of the mirror that remained most distilled in my memory, that I always came back to and lingered over in fits of nostalgic longing. The two of us, so young and blossoming, nearly feral with sex, believing we alone had invented the orgasm (an eye roll, please—but we’d believed it!), delighting in our own exquisiteness, poignant in our desperation, convinced we were destined for greatness—such intense surety! (I’d had so much less, but felt like so much more!) How wild and commanding I’d been with him.