“What was your name?” he asked. The others had stopped their side discussions of the film and positioned themselves in her direction in sharp, targeted angles like sharpshooters.
“Sheila,” she said.
“Sheila. Why do you think it was an accident, Sheila?”
She looked down into her glass. Perhaps the answer was somewhere at the bottom. She thought of suicides that had been ruled as accidents in the past. Marilyn Monroe, for example, although she’d always agreed with conspiracy theorists that it had been neither an accident nor a suicide but something more along the lines of a murder and cover-up. Her uncle, whose hushed overdose as a young man she’d only recently begun to suspect might have been intentional.
“Accidents can happen to anyone. Suicide takes a special breed.”
She thought the statement was just elliptical enough to pass for profound. But the others looked at one another, unsure where to place her comment within the context of the conversation. It offered no possible segues and, like her, sat there, dead, in the middle of the room.
Sheila took another long sip of whiskey. When she looked up from the group, she saw Scott approaching her. She couldn’t decide whether to be angry at him for leaving her alone or grateful that he had trusted her enough to hold her own with the people at this party. Either way, she felt relieved. It looked like the alcohol had loosened him up a little, unhinged him from that petulant mood he’d adopted at home and in her car.
If it were possible, he looked even more attractive to her than usual. She felt the fleeting inclination to end the night right there, take him home and seduce him, seize control of things in a way she’d been too timid to attempt before. She wanted to be the one to fall asleep first with Scott curled up next to her for a change, desperate for more. She wanted him to come multiple times, deep inside her, pornographically. She wanted to give him a proper fuck.
She had entertained the idea of giving fate a little nudge, sticking a pin through the silver-wrapped condom he kept in a black dish next to the bed. While his extreme attention to the business of contraception should’ve made her feel safe, sometimes she didn’t see it that way. Was it so horrific a thought that she might conceive his child? Was a baby born to a mother who looked like her the worst possible scenario, a situation to be avoided at any cost? In all honesty, she wanted to know what he’d do. The mere probing of it made her feel ashamed, but it was nice to know there were ways a woman like her could keep a man like him around.
Scott picked her up from the waist from the edge of the couch so swiftly that she forgot about the discussion she’d been stuck in. The relief on her face was visible to anyone. Her drink spilled, so he fetched her another, this one stronger than before, darker; it seemed thick with syrup.
“Youhavingfun?” He said it all together, like it was her name. She realized he was becoming drunk.
“I am, now that you’re here with me.” She pulled close to him and hugged his middle, careful not to slosh her drink down the side of her dress. Her cheek brushed his chest. She kept it there.
“Ron, Augusta, over here,” he called to them. Sheila withdrew and stood beside him.
“Sheila, let me introduce you to a couple of people over here,” said Augusta, her fingers gripping Sheila’s shoulders with more pressure than was entirely necessary.
“I’d like to stay with Scott,” she said.
“No. Go with Augusta. It’ll be good for you.” He moved away from her and shared a quick, chummy look with Ron.
The women stood in a semicircle next to the fireplace. Two of them were actually wearing shoulder pads, a throwback to an ’80s sense of empowerment. Sheila wondered whether the things had come back in style while she’d been in the hospital. She didn’t know what was “in” anymore, and looking down at her own frock, she saw it now for the desperate attempt at glamour it was. Her coat seemed hopelessly buried underneath mountains of others at the back of the closet, so far away, in fact, she felt she’d never see it again.
“This, girls, is Sheila. Scott’s Sheila.”
The women perused her with museum-like dissection. They each picked a different part of her to inspect. One examined the dress, her eyes widening as they drew down to the tulle window. Another woman, blonde—like Sheila’s hair but wonderfully alive with body, the perfect color of butter—smiled and looked into her eyes. Sheila always had thought her own eyes were too close together, so close that people looked at her as if she had just the one, then quickly turned away from its dreary focus.
“How did you meet Scott exactly?” one of them asked her.
“I ran out of gas on the Beltway.”
She’d lost it right after the exit for the George Washington Parkway. The car had putt-putted to the side of the road for a few meters then stopped, slanted toward the guardrail, where its wheels had frozen in place. She’d flashed her hazards, looked behind her on both sides, and produced a tissue that she waved furiously from a cracked window. She imagined Scott must have seen a person for whom decency often needed to be coaxed, if not forcibly extracted, from passersby.
“Well, that’s original. Does that happen to you a lot?” Augusta asked. “Running out of gas?”
“No, it doesn’t actually.”
The others issued murmured acceptances before exchanging a look. Sheila’s tone had taken a sharp, icy dip that she could tell no one seemed to appreciate.
“It beats the way he met his last girlfriend,” Augusta said. “She worked at his dealership. Their first date was in the backseat of one of the Corollas, if I’m not mistaken. Corolla, girls, or Camry? Do you remember her?”
“Oh, yeah, I do. Her goal in life was to blow someone during a test drive.”
“Smile!” someone said.
Sheila turned around to catch the last bit of a blinding flash.
“Get in here, Jacob. I want a picture with you and us girls. Sheila, could you?” asked Augusta.
Could she what? Be in the picture as one of “us girls”?
“I’ll hold your drink,” another one said, the churned-butter head.
Take it. They wanted her to take the picture. She suddenly felt ridiculous for having ever thought otherwise.
Jacob handed her the camera, and she stepped back until her heels hit the carpet. She pulled her hair behind her ear two times, an affectation left over from high school. The women grouped around the balding, beady-eyed Jacob, tugging at different parts of his suit, trying out wide party smiles, none of them genuine. Sheila looked through the camera’s small window but couldn’t get them all in the frame.
“Zoom’s on the side,” Jacob said.
She felt a powerful rush at her left temple, as if someone had hit her in the head with an aluminum baseball bat and she had yet to experience the full blast of pain. The heel of her shoe gave out and her ankle collapsed outwardly at the sudden knock on the inside of her head. There was a flash. The camera hit the floor before she realized she’d just taken a picture of her own foot.
Her heel came completely off as she bent down to pick up the pieces. She went for the brown roll of film first, as if a quick snatch from the light of the room might save the film from exposure. The wooden floor pressed down savagely against her knees, and she felt one of the spaghetti straps fall down, almost on cue. She could see herself quite clearly, even through the drunken fog in her head: a woman in a too-tight dress, the color of a fresh period stain, crawling on all fours, trying to pick up the last pieces of something. No stunt doubles or stand-ins necessary. This was a scene she knew by heart.
Later she was informed by Jacob (who looked at her for the rest of the night as if she’d murdered his grandmother) that the now-ruined roll of film had contained pictures of him and Kim Basinger at a political function. The other women left Sheila by the fire. The crackling embers burned the backs of her legs, although she hardly could muster the resolve it took to move away.
Scott kept his distance. He stared at her from across the room with a look that s
eemed to repeat, “I told you so. You’re the one who wanted to come.”
She finished her drink and had another, still stronger. A game of charades had begun in another room. She heard shouts and malicious guffaws. Someone screamed “Fellini” to a riotous round of applause. She spoke briefly to a short Thai woman who hauled in huge sacks of ice to a now-empty bar. Sheila’s questions caught the woman off guard, and she answered them in curt bites of broken English before snatching up crumpled cocktail napkins and leaving the room altogether.
At the end of the night, Scott found her behind the bar on the floor. She touched his face, and the heat of his flushed cheeks warmed her fingers. She grabbed hold of his offered hand and pulled herself up from the floor. Her dress was stuck uncomfortably around her waist, and when she tried to pull it down and attempted to catch her shallow, soused breath, she knocked over a drink she’d placed next to her. The laughter from the other room had grown louder. It had silenced for brief spurts but now teetered nervously toward a manic, agitated roar.
Scott found Sheila’s coat and he put it on her. The dress underneath felt cold and even tighter around her, almost as if it had shrunk during the night and would now only come off if it were burned away from her skin in pieces. She felt for her keys in the pocket and made a motion to unlock the front door of Ron and Augusta’s house. Scott moved to open it himself, ignoring her odd fumble. He pushed them both into the night, and Sheila wondered whether he’d bothered to say a single good-bye to anyone in her name.
As she’d predicted, her car was blocked in. There was a space just wide enough to pass heading straight into the lawn.
“Please go in and get someone in there to move so we can get out of here,” she said, opening her car door.
“No. I can get us out,” he said.
“You’re drunk, Scott.”
“So are you.”
“Go get someone.”
“Get in, Sheila.” He pushed her to the side of the car. “I’m not going back in that house. Not tonight.”
She remembered when he’d stopped to help her on the side of the road the day they’d first met. “I’m such an idiot,” she’d said, but he was so breezy about it.
“I’ve got a little gas can in my car for emergencies. We’ll fill you up then get you a full tank.” She’d watched him from behind as he poured gas in her tank.
They had followed each other to the Crown station off the next exit. She leaned on the hood of her silver Celica while he pumped gas for her. He stared at her across the top of the car. She smiled back, and for a second, the sun seemed to take away all his features until all she could see was his mouth, his tongue pushing through the white gate of his teeth like a pink fish.
She’d said one should never pass up a car wash attached to a gas station on sheer principle. “C’mon. Get in,” she’d told him.
He got into the passenger side of her car, almost clipping his head on the door’s sharp, angular frame. A man motioned for her to go into neutral and roll up her windows, then waved her forward. Her car was very clean inside except for a layer of dust in the creases of the gearshift’s black apron. Sheila pushed in a tape, and the Smiths came on. Jet streams of multicolored soap covered the windshield, bleeding into one another to create a mélange of purplish gray, like the color of a bruise. The darkness of the car made the music seem more important.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” she answered.
“Why do you drive such an old car? I noticed that your gas gauge is broken.”
She gripped the steering wheel. She could dance around this or she be upfront. “Do you want the whole story?”
“Of course,” Scott replied.
“I was working for an advertising firm,” she began. “Doing administrative work. I’d just completed a two-year certificate program after taking a few years off after high school. And I was so looking forward to starting a new job. A new life. All that.”
There had been a woman in her office named Brenda. Brenda was a junior executive and head copywriter. She and Sheila, somehow, became fast friends. They would go to lunch and would sometimes get a drink together after work. It was wonderful. She was so beautiful with her black Snow White hair and the voice of an old movie star. And everything she said was brilliant. It was like Brenda was coasting through life on an escalator while everyone else was hurrying up the stairs, desperately trying to keep up with her. She’d never had a friend like Brenda. She’d never had many friends, period, let alone someone so captivating, so accomplished.
When Brenda was going away for a week on vacation, she asked Sheila to take care of her dog, Darien.
“Feel free to hang out at my place if you want. Mi casa es su casa. And Darien mostly will keep to herself.” She gave Sheila a spare key on a Pizza Hut keychain.
Brenda’s condo was, predictably, stunning. So sleek and modern with exposed ductwork and steel railings along a loft passageway, as well as thatched latticework like Sheila had seen in a spread in House Beautiful. Darien thankfully proved to be aloof and very low maintenance. One night, three days into her dog-sit Sheila came over late to take her for a walk. As they made their way back up the elevator after the walk, the horrid realization struck her: she’d left Brenda’s spare key inside the condo and the door had locked behind her.
She begged at the main desk for a master key, but it was after hours, and the man at the desk was a contract security guard. He knew nothing about any master key.
“Don’t they have to come in to change her air-conditioning filter or get in if she went missing or something?”
“Like I said, lady, I don’t have a key. And I don’t know where a key is. You’ll have to wait until morning.”
Pets were not allowed in Sheila’s building. She couldn’t take Darien back with her. She dialed information from a courtesy phone in Brenda’s lobby and found a locksmith who was open twenty-four hours in Southeast D.C.
“Is this the first time this has happened to you?” asked a woman with an Eastern European accent and Slavic features. She had arrived with a man in a red sweatshirt and a hat who carried a toolbox.
“Yes, in my whole life. And this is hopefully the last time.”
“This is a nice lock. Expensive,” the woman said as she examined it. Darien jumped up to be let in. “You can’t pick it. They usually put this kind of lock in office buildings. It’s very secure.”
“So what does that mean?” Sheila had asked. A nervous twitch had developed in her left arm, which she cradled with worry in her right hand, holding onto Darien’s leash.
“It means we’ll have to drill through the current lock and put in a new one.”
It was going to cost $269 to get through the door then replace the lock.
“You’re sure it’s going to be the same quality lock?”
“It’ll be better, because it’ll be a locksmith’s lock,” the woman said.
“The new lock will come with two keys, right?” Sheila asked.
“Yes.”
“And you have the lock with you?” Sheila asked.
“Yes. I just have to get it down from my truck.”
The man in the red sweatshirt drilled the door while the woman went to retrieve the new lock. They made a lot of noise as they fit the new lock in the hole in the door. An older woman down the hall stuck her head out to see what was happening.
“This doesn’t look remotely like the old lock. Look,” Sheila said, pointing at the one on the door across the hall after they had finished installing it.
“I don’t understand. This lock is perfectly acceptable,” the woman said, shrugging at Sheila as if she were simply over the debate.
“That’s just it—it’s ‘acceptable,’ not high-end. This is an inferior lock. And the key is lightweight and doesn’t even look like the old one. This isn’t my apartment. I can’t leave her with this lock.”
“What choice do you have?” the woman asked.
In an envelope, with the two
new keys, one of them slipped back onto the keychain, Sheila left Brenda a note explaining what had happened. She hoped for the best but she was worried.
“The next day at work,” she’d told Scott, “I swung by her office to apologize about the lock and to see if I could take her to lunch to make it up to her. Well, I knocked on the door and then opened it when I didn’t hear anything. She looked up at me like she had no idea who I was. It was unsettling. Then there was this flicker in her eyes like, ‘Oh, yes—you. Can I help you?’ I had no idea what to say, what to do. I was struck dumb. I sort of slunk out of her office back to my cubicle like a dazed prisoner. The whole episode was so disturbing. The next day, I asked one of the other admins about it. She informed me that Brenda had been telling people that I was obsessed with her. That I had changed the lock to her apartment so I could spy on her. She said I was creepy and weird, and she didn’t find any of it flattering.
“I went home that night in shock. I was so heartbroken and depressed and embarrassed. I thought about suicide. I really did. I broke a mirror and picked up one of the slivers in the bathroom and I caught my eyes in it. Something in that look scared me. I could not trust the person in the mirror who was giving that look. I got into this car, drove straight to Charlottesville, and checked myself into the psychiatric wing of the hospital at the University of Virginia. It’s where my grandmother stayed for several months in the seventies. It was the only place I could think of to go. I knew that if I didn’t go right at that second, I would harm myself. This car saved my life.”
Inside the car wash, the silence in the Celica stood out in sharp contrast to the muted rumblings on the outside. Labeled cylinders sprayed rust inhibitor on the car, then sealant wax, as Sheila and Scott moved through the wash, coasting in neutral. The last light rinse misted over them, and the sound of an air vacuum loomed ahead. Scott leaned over and placed the palm of his hand on Sheila’s cheek. When he kissed her, it surprised them both. He looked at her in the approaching light at the end of the tunnel. Her eyes were wide open, as if it were the only way she could have believed that yes, absolutely, it was her this was happening to.
Read by Strangers Page 5
