by Jean Hegland
When she reached the decrepit Victorian mansion on the edge of campus where she rented an attic room, she paused for a moment on the broken sidewalk to look up at it. An American flag hung upside down in a second-story window, and a string of faded Tibetan prayer flags festooned the railing of the widow’s walk, fluttering in the cold breeze like last year’s leaves. From where she stood she could feel the throb of the sound system in the living room—Mick Jagger singing about some girls—and she knew that a party was already percolating inside.
A car filled with frat boys careened past, shedding its own music as it went, its wheels sending an impersonal spatter of gravel across the sidewalk. She took a last breath of icy air and headed up the weathered steps and past the department-store mannequin that stood like a sentinel on the porch. Someone had dressed the mannequin in a new outfit—a bikini, a muskrat coat, and a Ronald Reagan mask.
When she opened the door, she was assailed by a blast of sound. Music pounded inside her rib cage like an extra heart, and the smoke that billowed out at her was so dense, she had to fight to keep from gagging. Peering through the gloom, she could see that the front room was packed with students and strangers, and even several hip professors. Everyone was yelling and laughing and passing things—joints, cigarettes, jugs of wine—in eccentric circles. Strings of bulbous Christmas lights hung from the ceiling, and a black light illuminated the room with its menthol glow. In front of a blaring speaker, a woman in a glowing white dress danced by herself, flipping her waist-length hair like a feathered whip.
Ducking her head and clutching her books, Anna dove into the room. She thought she heard someone call her name, but she kept moving, pushing and twisting through the crowd as though she were running an obstacle course. She had almost reached the hall when she felt someone touch her shoulder and heard a voice in her ear. “We’ve been looking all over for you.”
She turned and saw the dancer in the white dress—Estelle—her face flushed with excitement. Beneath the taut fabric of her dress her breasts were lithe, precise, her rib cage a series of descending ripples. “Go get your camera,” she cried, opening her mouth in a wide laugh that the music swallowed.
“Not now,” Anna answered. “I—”
“Arden and Rick made a mold of Samantha’s body and cast it in Jell O. They’re in the kitchen right now, handing out spoons. Hurry,” Estelle urged.
“I’m not—I really …” Anna hesitated, passing her hand across her forehead.
She was grateful for the volume of the room, which hid the wobble in her voice, but even so Estelle suddenly looked concerned. “Are you okay?” she yelled. “You don’t look that great. Have you been at another party already? Maybe you need to lie down for a while.”
Anna nodded and pushed on through the crowd and then up the cold back stairs to her room. Inside, she dropped her backpack on the floor, set her portfolio against the wall, and slumped against the door. The stillness was so complete it felt congealed, though below her the sounds of the party continued. She was too weary to take off her coat, too weary even to cross the room to turn on the space heater. She flung herself down on her mattress, wrapping herself in her grandmother’s quilt and burying her face in her cold pillow. For a long time she lay there, listening to the throb of the party, inhaling the faint scent of herself embedded in the pillowcase, feeling the air press against her shoulders like a cold washcloth, and watching as the last light seeped slowly from the room. She remembered the light that had flickered through the high windows in the waiting room, how moved she had been by it, how comforted by its watery calm. But that was before, she thought. And this is after.
She felt a cavernous loneliness. She wanted to find someone who would promise her that things would be okay. She wanted to weep in someone’s arms, wanted to be comforted by someone, and forgiven. But she’d only been in Indiana since September, not long enough to have made any real friends yet. All of her old friends were dispersed around the world like dandelion seed. For a moment she considered trying to find a secluded telephone and calling one of them. But even if she could manage to sort out what time it was in New York or Paris or on the North Slope, and even if she could arrange to pay for the call, she couldn’t imagine what she would say. She saw herself clutching the receiver and trying not to sob while the expensive seconds ticked by.
For a moment she thought of her family—her parents, her grandmother, her sister—but they were both too near and too distant to trouble with this. A new record came on, Stevie Nicks singing about changes. Anna thought of the sculptor. She remembered his mane of auburn hair, the curves and planes of his shoulders and chest, his proud hooked nose and tawny-green eyes. For an instant she let herself imagine that he would be glad and tender when she told him, that he would wrap her in his finely muscled arms and lift her into another life. She saw them together, on a farm somewhere in springtime, he working in his foundry, she in her darkroom, the two of them meeting in the evening for a meal of brown bread and red wine and steaming soup. She imagined him cupping her growing belly with his sinewy hand, imagined her smiling up at him, imagined their shining eyes meeting.
The record quit, and a fresh burst of laughter rocked the house. “Bullshit,” she scoffed into the pillow, though the word smelled sour after she’d spoken it, and sounded way too small. That was what had caused all this to begin with, that kind of gooey stupidity. She forced herself to remember the last time she’d seen him, how he’d called her babe and draped his arm around her as though she were a thing he owned.
She wondered where he was tonight, what he was doing while she lay alone in the darkness of her cold room, the bundle of cells they’d set in motion snowballing inside her. It’s his fault, she thought. He did this to me. But before her anger grew large enough to matter, it was toppled by a futile truth. He hadn’t done anything she hadn’t thought she wanted. He couldn’t be blamed for the fact that she’d decided to let him into her bed. He couldn’t be blamed for the fact that her diaphragm had failed.
It was after midnight when she finally unwrapped herself from the quilt. She groped through the darkness until the lamp chain tickled her fingers. She pulled it, and a red-tinged light spilled from the beaded shade into the room. She forced herself off her bed and across the dry pine floor to the space heater in the corner. She plugged it in and waited as it clattered to life. Holding out her palms, she stood unthinking, staring at the red, glowing rods, soaking up the elementary comfort of heat and light until the color stung her eyes and her palms began to itch and tingle. Then she went back to the mattress, took the sheaf of papers the nurse had given her from her backpack.
Literature, she thought, as she spread the pages across the bed, hearing the nurse’s word and remembering the English classes she’d taken as an undergraduate. You’re not the first one, the nurse had said, though of all the novels that Anna had ever read, she could not think of one about a woman in a rented attic room at midnight, half nauseous and alone, studying the mimeographed pages spread before her like the tarot cards that would reveal her future.
Below her the party continued to surge while she read and reread every word the nurse had given her, looking for the choices she’d been promised, seeking the hidden meanings she’d learned to search for in her English classes, trying to identify the decision that would return her life to the way it had been. She read until she’d memorized the words, read until her vision was thick and her head throbbed with unshed tears. But as hard as she tried, in the end she could find no choices, no safe havens, no way out.
CERISE UNLOCKED THE FRONT DOOR AND PUSHED AGAINST IT WITH her armload of schoolbooks. A sigh escaped her as she stepped inside, and it was as though the house also gave a sigh, exhaling the breath it had held all day in her absence. Inside it was still and utterly quiet, exactly as she and her mother had left it that morning, and yet as always, it seemed to hold a little edge of strangeness, as though she were returning to an alternative world, like in some old Twilight Zone rerun. There was
her mother Rita’s pastel sofa, her cream-colored carpet, her glass-and-chrome coffee table still strewn with the little debris of Cerise’s breakfast. There were the new drapes Rita was buying on time, and the original oil painting she’d picked up last week at the furniture store closeout. It was all as Cerise remembered it, and yet everything seemed slightly different, too. Or maybe, Cerise thought resignedly, it was she who was different, she who did not quite belong, not even in her own home, not even alone.
Standing in the living room, she inhaled deeply, partly out of relief at having made it through another day at school, and partly so that she could fill her nose with the smell of the place that was her home. Just for a moment she was able to examine the scent she could never detect once she’d been there for a while—that particular mix of perfumes and disinfectants, and below that, the slight sourness she always associated with her mother, a smell of unwashed nylons or unacknowledged disappointment.
It was a smell that interested and unnerved Cerise, a whiff of foreignness at the core of who she was. It reminded her of how she felt each spring when she opened the envelope that contained her school photographs and drew out the sheets of little, identical Cerises. She knew that the girls on the glossy paper were supposed to be a more accurate reflection of herself than the glimpses she caught in windows and mirrors, but even so, she couldn’t help feeling that they were only a distant cousin of the person she really was.
Despite the silence of the house, it was a comfort to be home again. Passing through the living room and down the mute hallway, Cerise could feel her face slacken as the expressions she had struggled all day to cover it with slid off. Her shoulders sagged, her spine collapsed, even her pelvis relaxed. But a moment later, climbing the stairs to her room, she felt the same little ache she experienced each afternoon as the quiet closed in around her once again.
Only it was worse today.
She allowed herself one quick thought of Sam, as though the memory of what he had just done wouldn’t be so bad if she took it like a scalding drink, one careful sip at a time. But despite her caution, she was unable to control the hot spill of it, the way shame and yearning burst over her in a blistering flood. She remembered his fingers lingering in her palm, how, even though he’d never looked at her, he’d made it seem as if they shared a secret, as if he knew how often she thought about him—riding on the bus and sitting in bonehead algebra and lying in her bed at night.
Upstairs in her bedroom she dumped her books on a chair and kicked off her brand-new loafers, half hoping she might scratch the leather as she toed them from her feet. For her birthday she had asked her mother for secondhand boots from the army surplus store because she loved how used and rugged they looked, because they were what the girls wore whom she most admired at school. But Rita had said she wouldn’t hear of paying good money for her daughter to wear some strange man’s worn-out boots, and her fifteenth-birthday present to Cerise had been penny loafers instead.
It was an old contention between her mother and herself, Cerise’s love of hand-me-downs. Outcasts, castoffs, any object that had once been used and valued and was now ignored, had always touched Cerise in a way that nothing new ever could. It used to infuriate Rita when Cerise would pull a cracked piggy bank or a scalped rag doll from a stranger’s garbage can and bring it home—germy and stinking—wash it with dish soap, mend it with ragged stitches, and then play with it instead of with the dolls that Rita bought for her.
Rita’s dolls came with outfits and tiny high-heeled shoes that clamped onto their permanently S-shaped feet. With their shiny hair, their pert expressions, and their hard, unnippled breasts, those dolls seemed to have no need of Cerise, and Cerise, unable to imagine how to animate them, had had no need for them. Instead, when she was five and six and seven and eight, she used to sit for hours alone in the room her mother had decorated for her, playing with the creatures she’d rescued from the trash. Downstairs in the living room, her father yelled and her mother cried while Cerise huddled behind her closed door and made up stories of hardship and redemption for her dolls, saving them again and again from witches and robbers, slapping their chipped cheeks or spanking their plush rumps when they were bad, and then kissing them, rocking them, forgiving them. So she had comforted herself with the rich slosh of her own emotion while her parents raged and wept below her.
Rita’s dolls still lined the shelf above Cerise’s bed, and for a moment she paused, considering them. With their dust-grimed skins and fading dresses, they now looked almost like the sort of toys Cerise would once have loved. Fleetingly she imagined washing their clothes and wiping their faces clean. But then, remembering Sam, she reminded herself that she was too big for dolls.
Back before she got too old, Cerise would sometimes come home from school to find her room smelling of lemon and pine and ammonia, a grim-faced Rita poking the roaring vacuum beneath the canopy bed, and all her trash-dolls gone, deported like illegal aliens back to where they’d come.
“You should have seen your room,” Rita would announce, as though Cerise had been staying somewhere else. “I don’t know how you can stand to live in a pit like that.”
But by the time Cerise entered third grade, all that had changed. Her father gave her a TV to remember him by and moved south, leaving Rita and Cerise on their own in Rossi, the city that had sprung up almost since Cerise’s birth between San Francisco and the Central Valley. After her husband left, Rita’s hair turned shiny, her breasts hardened, and her feet seemed to grow S-shaped in the high-heeled shoes she always wore. She got a job and arrived home each day at suppertime with a headache and a bag of takeout steamed sodden in foil wrappings. After that, the treasures Cerise salvaged from the garbage remained undisturbed, and sometimes it seemed the only thing that changed from one year to the next was the weight of the books she carried home from school.
Standing beside her bed, Cerise slipped out of her bell-bottoms and tossed them toward the laundry basket. At least she’d worn her nicest blouse, she reminded herself as she shrugged it off and pulled a T-shirt from her drawer. At least she’d maybe looked a little okay.
She’d spent the whole bus ride home trying to decide whether or not she should stop at the market for a Coke. It was Friday, and she’d wanted that little reward for making it to the end of another week. She’d wanted to begin her solitary weekend with a treat, and she’d also thought that if Sam were working that afternoon, she would be able to catch a glimpse of him, though she was so afraid he might notice her that by the time the bus reached her stop, she’d decided to skip the Coke. But as she stepped down onto the diesel-scented street, she found herself heading toward the market, after all.
She’d seen him the minute she’d opened the worn screen door. He was leaning against the counter beside the cash register, reading a magazine. Standing in the doorway, she’d felt a hot buzz of confusion, and only her fear that he would look up and see her sneaking away convinced her to enter the store. Like a timid thief she’d eased her Coke from the cooler and then stood for a long time, pretending to study the cans of Spam and Spaghetti-Os before she worked up the nerve to carry the bottle to the counter.
Sam hadn’t said a word as he rang up the sale, not “Hi,” or, “That everything?” or even “Want to use the opener?” Keeping her eyes on the upside-down picture in the magazine between them—a girl in a bikini straddling a shiny motorcycle—she’d handed him her dollar bill, mutely held out her hand to receive the change. When, along with the trickle of dimes and pennies, she felt the press of his forefinger inside her palm, she’d looked up, startled.
But although his finger was caressing slow circles around the coins cupped in her hand, his face was as blank as if he were watching TV. She’d snatched her hand away, and her change shattered across the counter and down onto the sticky floor. Hurriedly, she knelt to pick up her pennies, and when she’d ventured a glance at Sam, he was studying his magazine, though she thought she saw a private smile flicker across his face.
> Now, as she crossed the strewn floor of her bedroom and turned on her television, she felt a fresh flush of shame. The laugh track from an I Love Lucy rerun frayed a small hole in the silence of the house, and she stood before the TV, watching as Lucy wrung her hands and Ethel tried to comfort her. Still staring at the screen, Cerise reached beneath her bed and drew out the box of cake mix she’d snuck from the kitchen cupboard and hidden there. She fed herself spoonful after spoonful, sitting on the floor of her room, almost choking on the chalky flour, and rubbing the sharp grains of sugar against her palate with her tongue until the sweetness disappeared, her mouth was scoured sore, and she could taste the secret salt of her blood. But even after she’d eaten half the box, she could still see Sam’s half smile, still feel his finger in her palm, still feel the roar of confusion it caused inside her.
She left her bedroom to roam the house, drifting like a wraith from room to room. Downstairs, she stared so long at Rita’s new painting that the floppy-eared puppies almost seemed to move. She felt such a helpless cramp of love for those creatures that for a moment she was tempted to draw them. Back in junior high, when she found a picture she liked on a calendar or a greeting card, she used to tear a sheet of paper out of her binder and draw a copy of it for herself. The lines on the paper always made the baskets of flowers or the kittens or colts look as though they were behind bars, but even Rita used to remark how much like the real pictures Cerise’s copies were.
“Where you got that knack from,” Rita would say, “I don’t know. Not me, and for sure not your dad. He couldn’t even draw a paycheck,” she’d add with bitter humor, and Cerise would feel a guilty compunction, as though she’d dragged her ability for drawing home like another doll from someone else’s trash.
