Look at Me

by Jennifer Egan

  One of Irene’s new Ordinaries happened to be Pluto. “I have three words for you on Pluto,” Thomas told her during one of our many recent visits to his office. “Dickens. Dickens. Dickens.”

  “You mean … victim of circumstance,” Irene said.

  “Exactly.”

  “Living below his—”

  “You got it.”

  “So his fortunes will improve. They have to.”

  “Bingo,” Thomas said.

  Irene was starting to scare me.

  She wouldn’t talk to me about Pluto—said it was breaking his confidence—but Pluto and I gossiped tirelessly about Irene: Was she as straitlaced as she seemed, or was some shock of wildness hidden in her? Was her husband really a genius, or just a loser? What color were her bathroom tiles? And why was she so quiet lately; had we started to bore her?

  Irene folded up her phone and sat in silence. Contact with Thomas left her disoriented, as if she’d been jostled by a crowd. “He still wants to come,” she finally said.

  “Why?” I objected. “What’s he going to do, give me a tour of my hometown, which he’s never seen in his life?”

  “I cannot imagine,” she said, in a tone of wonderment that Thomas often induced in Irene. “He keeps talking about movie cameras.”

  She leaned into the heels of her hands and shut her eyes. I had thought, after our fight and reconciliation, that Irene and I would become closer, like sisters. We hadn’t. Something had shifted or fallen or failed between us, and what we had become, instead, were professionals. Fellow employees of Extra/Ordinary.com—comrades, yes, but not friends. Our very employment seemed to isolate us from each other in a way that brought to mind my professional beauty days, when I’d been too beholden to the rich homeowners who made my life possible to afford an allegiance to someone else as beholden as I.

  I exited the interstate onto East State Street, the five-mile tentacle Rockford had extended over many years to greet it. “Voilà!” I told Irene. “Feast your eyes.”

  Even as a child, riding home with my mother and Grace after a Saturday in Chicago, new dresses and Frango mints from Marshall Field’s packed carefully in our trunk, lunch at the Walnut Room still alive in our minds—even then, when the drive between Rockford and Chicago had encompassed the entire trajectory of my known world, arriving at State Street’s outer reaches, at that point practically rural, had roused in me not the lilt of home but a flat dead drone inside my head. Even then, I experienced my return to Rockford as a submersion, a forfeiture of the oxygen of life. And with every subsequent return there had been a flattening, an incursion of dreariness, as I remembered what I had come from and faced it again.

  Except now. Today, a silly joy flopped at my heart as I drove past the Clocktower Hotel with its “Museum of Time,” past the “Welcome to Rockford” sign, past the Courtyard Inn, the Holiday Inn, the Bombay Bicycle Club, Burger King, Country Kitchen, Red Roof Inn, Gerry’s Pizza, Mobil, Century 21, Merrill Lynch, Lowe’s Gardening and Home Depot. I felt proud of Rockford for appearing on cue and playing its part with such conviction. I had told Irene it would be blighted, bloated, vacant, and now Rockford heaped upon us a quintessentially awful American landscape, the sort of vista that left Europeans ashen-faced: flat, hangar-sized windowless buildings; a swarm of garish plastic signs; miles of parking lot crammed with big American cars throwing jabs of sunlight off their fenders and hubcaps. It was a land without people, save for a few insect-sized humans sprinkled among the parking lots like stand-ins from an architectural scale model, humans diminished to quasi-nonexistence by the gargantuan buildings and giant midwestern sky, pale blue, dotted with tufts of cloud, vast and domineering as skies in Africa.

  At last Irene’s pen was moving. Pool-o-rama, Tumbleweed, Stash O’Neill’s, Happy Wok … I felt proud! Proud of my hometown! Of its hokey ethnic restaurants, of its meticulous obliteration of the natural world. Of the vertiginous sense that we could be anywhere in America and find these same franchises in this exact order. Of Rockford’s scrupulous effacement of any lingering spoor of individuality, uniqueness!

  I had booked rooms for us at the Sweden House, nearer the river on East State Street and always the motel of choice among my visiting relations. After Irene and I checked in, I gazed out the window of my single room at the Sweden House’s faux-alpine façade, its little flags bearing generic coats of arms. I breathed smells of carpeting and Lysol and old cigarettes and braced myself for the familiar sensation of entombment. The Rockford thud. She sensed the possibility like a proverbial shoe waiting to drop, and it added fuel to the already smoldering fires of her uneasiness as she paced the room like a caged animal … Oh, shut up, I thought.

  I knocked on Irene’s door, which was next to mine. She was sitting on her bed beside her unopened suitcase, doing absolutely nothing. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Fine,” she said, with a blank look.

  “Feel like going for a walk?”

  “Sure.”

  “Actually,” I said, “people here don’t really walk. But we can try.”

  It was a misty, humid day. The air smelled of motor oil. We left the Sweden House and walked alongside several lanes of traffic toward Alpine Road. “Is this the downtown?” Irene asked, opening her notebook.

  “No, no,” I said. “That’s west, across the river. But no one goes there anymore.”

  “So … is there a center?”

  “Not really,” I said, and she took a note.

  Aunt Mary’s, my favorite diner and bakery in Rockford, had undergone a disappointing facelift since my last visit, its big flabby booths replaced by glass-topped tables accented with slender bottles of olive oil. When we’d ordered, Irene smiled at me and said, “So, how is it, being back?”

  This sort of exchange had become so routine between us that I hardly noted its friendly packaging; it registered simply as: “What’ve you got?” And now the lepidopterist to whom I’d subcontracted the job of preserving my thoughts and memories for delivery to Irene appeared with her samples pristinely embalmed, iridescent wings pinned flat against velvet: Driving into Rockford as a child. Seeing the perfect geometry of the cornfields. The Walnut Room, the Frango mints. The Rockford thud. Nowadays I remembered things constantly (I was being paid to remember); I panned, I grubbed, I fished, I lunged for recollections with a net; I plundered my own thoughts as recklessly as any oil baron ramming his way through pristine landscapes, convinced there would always be more. And in the moment of speaking these memories aloud, I disowned them. They sounded false to me—invented, exaggerated. They reminded me of advertising.

  Irene took notes.

  Her cell phone rang, provoking the usual spasm of dread in her face. “Hello?” she answered, and I knew instantly that the caller was not Thomas but her husband. “Hi, baby,” she said, the phrase a tender bundle of sadness and worry packed inside something mysterious, something that brought to mind warm rooms with curtains pulled. Intimacy, I guessed.

  I left the table so they could talk in peace. When we’d first come in, I had noticed a man who looked familiar; now I took another pass at him. He sat alone, two coffee mugs and several empty glasses vying for space at his table amidst an open book and a yellow legal pad, upon which he was furiously writing. It was Moose. He appeared much the same—still handsome, though heavier; older now, of course. I veered toward his table preparing to say hello, to laughingly reintroduce myself, but even as I approached, I felt tremors of misgiving. Moose seemed altered. On a Thursday afternoon in the fortyish year of his life, he was alone at Aunt Mary’s, in rumpled clothes, scribbling in a kind of frenzy. And whatever story it was that I’d heard about him began wafting back. Some bizarre episode of violence.

  By now I was standing at his table. Moose jerked up his head and looked at me fearfully. I had slept with him, of course, but I had no memory of that—what I remembered was my first glimpse of Moose on my front lawn, in slanted sunlight, tossing our sprinkler head in the palm of his hand with an air
of bemused investigation. I scanned his skittish brown eyes for some link to that regal, confident boy. Nothing. And I, of course, was unrecognizable. We stared at each other, two strangers. “I’m sorry,” I faltered, and moved away.

  Back at the table I sat, breathing shakily. “That was Moose,” I told Irene. “Ellen Metcalf’s brother. Something happened to him.”

  Irene turned to look, taking notes. I composed myself and used her phone to call Grace, from whom I learned, to my amazement, that Frank’s grudging willingness to let us photograph his home had blossomed inexplicably into an invitation to dinner. This rash of hospitality I could only attribute to the power of the New York Post, which Irene and I had invoked rather than try to explain what we were actually doing here. In fact, we’d resurrected the same bogus pretext she had originally used to dupe me: a story about a model with a damaged face; her background, her feelings, her struggles to adjust. And it was only now, at Aunt Mary’s, as Irene and I hammered out the final details of this lie (“Okay, we’ll say I called your agency.” “We’ll say it’s a story about identity.”), that I was struck by the fact that it was no lie—the story did exist, Irene was writing it; there was even talk of newspaper serialization!

  “You know, I think maybe you’re clairvoyant,” I said, regarding Irene in real astonishment. She smiled, avoiding my eyes. “I’m serious,” I said, “Have you ever done that before, made something up and then it came true?”

  “Jesus, let’s hope not,” she said, glancing out the window. Light fell across her face from one side, making deep shadows. And as she pushed the hair behind her ears, I glimpsed a catastrophic change to her shadow self: a degeneration from the dancing sylph of months ago, when we’d first met, to a lank, dreary presence—resigned to some deep unhappiness. This apparition so shocked me that I set down my glass and forced myself to look again—No, see? It’s gone, I told myself. I was staring.

  Irene turned away. “Knock it off, Charlotte,” she said.

  My sister’s new home, which I had seen only in pictures, was part of a brand-new development known as White Forest. “East of the interstate?” I’d exclaimed when she told me where it was. “You’ll be practically in Beloit!” But east of the interstate was where people were building these days, Grace informed me, now that the older farmers were dying off and their children were selling the farms to developers to avoid the taxes. A twinkling sign amidst the cornfields alerted us to a freshly paved road, which we followed into a saddle-shaped oasis of verdant knolls whose bright grass offset the scalding whiteness of perhaps two dozen columned colonials. There were no trees yet in White Forest, but a legion of skinny saplings no higher than my waist cowered under a scourge of wind that lashed at them from the miles of flat surrounding landscape. We nosed along a serpentine drive in search of my sister’s address.

  My brother-in-law appeared first, his gut leading the way with the burly insistence of a face. In my mind, Frank Jones embodied a certain physical crudeness: hands like shovel heads, side-of-beef face, a ditch where his navel should have been, so I was always startled to behold the nearly adolescent delicacy of his features. He was a roofer, or a roofer-cum-businessman who now managed several roofing franchises to the tune of two hundred grand a year, according to Grace.

  “Hiya, Charlotte,” he said, not bothering to kiss me hello, which I appreciated. He introduced himself to Irene, who greeted him with her new, inscrutable cheeriness. I had a feeling Frank would like Irene; she wasn’t stylish enough to offend him.

  Grace and the kids came tumbling from the house, Pammy and Allison sealing me in their arms without quite looking at me, hesitant to behold this reconfiguration of their glamorous Aunt Charlotte; Jeremy, the youngest, whom I’d never seen in person, swerving away and attaching himself, limpet-like, to his father’s chest. The wind set upon us with a roar, yanking conversation from our mouths, making the hair leap from our heads as we fought our way into the house.

  “Wind’s godawful,” Frank apologized to Irene, “but once these trees get some height, they’ll stop it dead.”

  Indoors, Grace pulled me into a laundry room and stared rapturously at my face. “I can hardly believe how much better you look!” she said, seizing my hands. My younger sister was one of the few people in my experience who was genuinely capable of beaming, and she beamed at me now in her jeans and pink sweatshirt whose white decal read “Sexy Moms.” The wedding ring hung loose on her thin red hand. “You look like nothing ever happened,” she said. “It must’ve been that second operation.”

  “Oh, Grace. Do you think so?” I asked, fending off the flock of acid replies I felt beating their wings against my skull: Tell that to all the people who used to be my friends, or I guess that’s why your daughters can’t face me. Instead I just hugged her, too hard, so we bumped together and Grace laughed. This hug of mine was sloppy, inexpert, prolonged (How did you end a hug? Who began the ending of it?) because I felt so grateful to Grace for believing I looked like myself, purely because she loved me.

  Frank and the girls were leading Irene on a tour of their new house. A kitchen spangled with fresh appliances, a spotless living room. Irene wore on a strap around her neck the Nikon Thomas Keene had lent us, having heeded my advice that she should get what pictures she needed immediately, in case Frank and I blew up and we were banished thereafter from his house. My history with my brother-in-law was a barren vista of enmity punctuated by occasional monuments of horror: the time I accidentally knocked him off the deck of his powerboat into Lake Michigan; the time he found out I’d slept with his best man on the eve of his wedding to Grace; the time he called me a bitch at the country club—shouted it, after too many Canadian Clubs—inciting a voluble exchange whose dreadfulness, in my memory, issued not from the public embarrassment we’d caused, not from our forcible ejection from the club or even the fact that we made my sister cry and my nieces cower beneath the table, but from the verbal constipation that had stricken me at that crucial juncture. “You …,” I’d begun, and whole minutes seemed to float past before I heaved up, “dope!” with a monstrous effort, the sheer volume of devastating truths I wished to unleash having clogged my throat, “You dumdum!” “You g-g-g—.” Hours drifted past, seasons changed, children grew up and had children of their own. “—goofball!”

  Even after our ejection from the club, I persisted in my anguished ravings as Frank hustled his sorrowful family into the car, convinced that if only I could loosen this momentary constriction, I would give silver-throated voice to my loathing for him, its textures and filigrees and chiaroscuro, but at that point I lost altogether the power to make words. “You gagrraglegh! You msnnnsgulums,” I bawled, aiming these wads of gibberish at a car window flecked with the sputum of my exertions, Frank shaking his head behind it as he drove away with his family, with Grace and the girls, leaving me alone in the parking lot with a panicky teenage attendant.

  The following summer, being no longer welcome in my sister’s home, I persuaded her to bring the girls to New York. We spent the weekend in what the three of them perceived as a swoon of decadence, sleeping until ten, ordering stacks of pancakes at Delphi, the Greek diner, Rollerblading to house music in Central Park in the arresting company of some very attractive black men. On Sunday night, Grace called Frank to say she was extending their visit by two days. I brought the girls to a shoot, where they curled their hair in my electric rollers and availed themselves of my various lipsticks; I let them eat popcorn in my bed while they watched MTV. I didn’t have to suggest a second deferral; Allison and Pammy did it for me, Pleasepleasepleaseplease, they keened, and that time, Frank’s objections were audible across the room. But Frank had lost his hold; they were mine, I thought greedily, I’d won, pried them from his shovel-handed grasp, and that night we used an extension cord to cheat the blender onto my balcony—frozen margaritas, virgins for the girls—we danced on my couch to the Jackson Five, and at last the girls fell asleep watching Murder by Death in my bed. I slept between them, a drugge
d sleep thickened by opiate smells of their hair and skin, a sleep so entangled that I never even heard the phone; it was Pammy who answered when the doorman called shortly after dawn to announce that Frank was downstairs (having driven through the night). Allison shook me awake with terror in her lovely eyes—oh no, oh no, Daddy’s here, and I barely had time to yank on my silk kimono and light up a Merit before his fat finger was trouncing my doorbell. I admitted him without a word. Frank made a spectacle of himself, hurling Chrysler building key-chains and Statue of Liberty mugs into suitcases, Grace hovering near him, swerving between guilty consternation and giddy explosions of laughter. I sat on my balcony and smoked in a state of deep calm. I barely heard their commotion, so attuned was I to the silence they would leave behind.

  Allison was almost fourteen now, with long amber hair, freckled skin that would age terribly, poor thing, but at present was flush with succulent youth; small breasts enhanced by what looked to be a mildly padded bra, light green eyes and a whooping laugh. Leonardo DiCaprio’s feline visage squinted from the walls of her bedroom, and from her closet she pulled a dress she would wear to a school dance the following week: a short-sleeved sheath with black and lavender stripes.

  Pammy, two years younger, still had the star-shaped hands and mushroom haircut of a little girl. She eyed the dress warily, as if knowing instinctively that it portended her neglect. I remembered how frantic Grace had been when I’d first begun to exclude her out of some notion I had of a more grown-up life, how afraid she’d been to face the world without my protection. And I had felt no sympathy at all—just impatience, resentment at the idea that I would hold myself back for her, for anyone. Ever in my life. “What about the movie?” she would plead. “The movie starring us?” Finally, weary of the question, I’d told her (the lepidopterist advanced, chloroform in hand, wearing her exterminator’s smile), “You’re not in the movie anymore. The audience liked me better.”