A RED WINTER SHADOW
On the coldest morning of the year, when the breath escaped Margaret’s mouth like a ghost, Margaret and James forgot to leave the water running. Their pipes froze, and no water at all came out when they turned on the faucets. It was a Friday in January, only a few days after New Year’s, and people still carried around lofty ideas about hope and change, Margaret and James included. Margaret had quit smoking and James had quit eating so much candy. James had also told Margaret he wanted to give her an engagement ring, but that he wanted her to choose it herself at the store this weekend. He didn’t know what kind of ring she would like, and did not want to impose his own aesthetic on her. Margaret appreciated this choice James was giving her, because she felt it was a small feminist gesture, but she also dreaded having to make a decision. The frozen water pipes did not fit with Margaret’s expectations for the upcoming year or the beginning of her engagement. Nothing should be broken at a time like this.
Margaret and James lived on the second floor of a large, old house that had been divided into four apartments like chambers of the heart. The other three apartments had been empty the entire time they had lived in the building, because they were in need of renovation and deep cleaning. The landlord was drunk all the time and did not seem in a hurry to do this. Margaret and James had never been in any of the other apartments, which felt strange to Margaret, since they shared walls. Margaret and James were sealed off in their own little section of the big house. Their section was mostly updated, although it still had a broken oven, no heater, and several holes in the walls for insects to crawl through.
They called the plumber, but he would unfortunately be unable to come until Monday. “Sorry,” the landlord texted. He also said the couple was welcome to use the bathroom in Apt. 1 downstairs.
“Dick,” James said. James always dealt with the landlord, whose weird gaze and jokes about sex bothered Margaret. James went to get the keys. James and Margaret took care of each other. They were a team.
James went to work without taking a shower, which surely bothered him a little, because he generally took good care of his hygiene (unlike Andrew, the insane veteran who was Margaret’s ex-fiancé). But James was a preschool teacher, and he said the children would not mind terribly or even notice if he skipped one shower. Margaret was in her first year as an assistant professor of Gender Studies, an accomplishment for someone in her mid-thirties. Margaret’s father had always said she’d accomplish great things in her career, regardless of her gender. She was currently still on winter break. She planned to spend the day at home revising an article about feminism that she hoped to publish in an academic journal. She needed to publish more articles to get tenure. She needed to publish more articles to remain accomplished. Although she did not plan to leave the house all day, she still insisted on showering downstairs, as she was a woman who measured her self-worth based not only on her professional achievements, but also on how she looked, even on days when she saw no one. It bothered Margaret that her personal feelings did not always line up with her intellectual beliefs. But she couldn’t help it.
After James left, Margaret put her towel and her bottles of soap and shampoo in a plastic bag. The keyring for Apartment 1 had about a dozen keys. Margaret could not imagine the reason for this.
She had to go outside and down a staircase to access the downstairs apartment. She tried the main door first. None of the keys on the keyring opened the main door, or at least, they didn’t work when she tried. Perhaps she was not inserting the keys correctly. In general, she worried she did not do enough things correctly. She was in a sour mood due to the water being broken, and became more and more annoyed with each failure to open the door. She went to the side door. During the summer, wasps had built a nest above the door, but all the wasps were now dead in the cold. She had success with this door.
The apartment felt much larger than it looked from the outside and it was very open, with a huge kitchen and two living rooms. The landlord or previous tenants had left some items there: two large mirrors, a nude painting of a woman, and a large sculpture of a man’s head on the mantle. Margaret turned on the main light, which was attached to a ceiling fan that began to rotate. Its blades sliced the cold air and stirred up something that had been lying in the apartment, very still as if sleeping, for a long time. The blades clicked as they cut the air, like a record player still on after the album’s end, rhythmically skipping over the silence, waiting for someone to come change it.
The ceiling fan made Margaret uncomfortable, so she walked away from it, into the bathroom. She lifted the toilet seat and saw that it was covered with a thick layer of dirt. Margaret did not like dirt, and furthermore, she liked everything to be in perfect order all the time. She had rituals that made her wonder if she were insane. Margaret wiped the dirt off with a wad of damp toilet paper, then washed her hands. The toilet seat now looked clean, but was obviously not clean, as there were no cleaning products there for her to use. She hovered above the seat, and winced as she urinated.
When she looked down, she noticed that she was once again bleeding, though she could not possibly be menstruating again already. She never had irregular bleeding like this until she started dating James. Other people had irregular bleeding for lots of different reasons, but she knew hers was related to the harmful strain of HPV that James had given her.
James’s ex-girlfriend had cervical cancer, something James had neglected to tell Margaret until they’d been together for several months. He waited until she was in love with him, when she would not be able to reject him because of this. Everyone has HPV, Margaret had thought at first, and this was basically true, but not everyone had this kind. James tried to convince Margaret that he did not understand the severity of cervical cancer or its link to HPV. He also tried to employ a bizarre line of reasoning in which Margaret was a magical, beautiful creature who was immune to the same infections that harmed other women.
Margaret had gone to the doctor a year ago when James told her about the cervical cancer. She had an abnormal pap smear, but no cancer, at least not yet. The doctor told her to keep an eye on the bleeding, and to come back frequently for check-ups. But Margaret had not gone back since, and didn’t plan to anytime soon. She did not like doctors. They could tell if you were dying, and they would let you know.
Margaret washed her hands again and let the thoughts of bleeding seep out of her mind. She did not think of the bleeding except when she saw it. She mostly thought of how nice James was to her now, unlike the other men she had dated. His bad behavior from the past did not fit with Margaret’s current idea of James. She looked into the bathtub. It was dirty, and filled with several insects. They were mostly dead, but one was apparently still alive. It lay on its back with its legs kicking and struggling in the air, gasping. Margaret shuddered. She did not like insects any more than she liked dirt. She turned the water on and washed them down the drain. She heard a faint screaming from the old pipes, as if the dead insects were in pain. She heard a deep breathing from the other room, or at least, her mind told her she heard it. She had had hallucinations her whole teenage and adult life, mostly auditory hallucinations of creatures breathing or growling under her bed while she tried to sleep. It used to disturb her, but she was used to it now.
Margaret’s father had insisted that she did not have hallucinations, but just saw and heard things other people couldn’t. “You were born with the umbilical cord wrapped around your neck,” he had said, “so I knew you’d be special.” After Margaret’s mother died when she was four, her father raised her to believe in ghosts, but to not be unnecessarily afraid. Some ghosts were good and some were bad, he explained to her, just like people. Margaret’s father taught her that the way to get rid of ghosts she didn’t want was to burn sage next to her bed at night. She found this never worked for her. She learned to ignore or at least tolerate the ghosts or hallucinations, whatever they were.
Margaret
did not go out of her way to notice ghosts now, but she did sometimes feel them. She kept this secret from most people, for fear of ridicule, even though she did not personally believe the idea of ghosts was any stranger than, for example, God.
Margaret tried the hot water and it did not work, so she stuck with the cold, which barely dripped down in a tiny stream. Pain is beauty, she thought to herself, and considered whether or not she believed this. She removed her clothing and hung it over the open bathroom door rather than putting it on the dirty floor or counter. She got into the shower despite the dirt, which she could feel contaminating the soles of her feet. She thought about the strangeness of contaminating oneself in the shower, where the objective was to become clean.
The bathroom was set up so that she could see her whole body in the mirror as she showered. Her own apartment had just one small mirror, in which she could see herself only from the waist up. She was now faced with her entire naked body, which looked thinner than it had a year ago, but still not how she wanted it to look. When she was a child, her father had noticed her looking in mirrors too often and for too long. He gave her a warning. “Some women go crazy that way,” he had said. “I don’t want you to be crazy.” Margaret’s solution to this was to avoid full-length mirrors. She never developed an eating disorder. But she spent just as much time looking in small mirrors, at her face, applying the same makeup over and over every time she used the restroom, for fear that it may have faded and her imperfections would show through.
Margaret watched her body shiver and hunch over in the mirror as she showered. She shaved her legs every day, and so she shaved now, although her legs were covered in goosebumps and it stung when she moved the razor blade across them. She was careful, but still made a tiny cut on her ankle. The blood flowed down the drain with the insects.
As she leaned her head back to rinse the conditioner out of her hair, trying not to let it drip onto her back for fear of developing acne there, she was forced to move her gaze from the mirror to the open bathroom door. Through the door, the ceiling fan still rotated. Some little dangling strings with beads on the ends clicked against each other. The fan reminded Margaret of time, how she’d always thought of weeks and months and years as circles, not lines. The fan rotated again and again, oblivious, as if the miracle of this order meant nothing to it. The strings disrupted this order. Margaret wanted them to just hang there, straight and still like icicles, but they insisted on being affected by the fan’s rotation, and spun about like the stupid swing ride at the fair, clicking. The sun shone bright through the bathroom window like a voyeuristic intruder. The water burned in its coldness, a knife-like icicle being thrust into her. She shut the water off. She shuddered again.
The towel on her cold skin felt like another razor blade. She tried to dry off quickly, and forgot about the cut on her ankle. “Fuck,” she said when she noticed the red stain on the towel. She blinked her eyes in rapid succession, a nervous habit she’d developed in childhood. Each time she blinked, it was like a blank slate: she was looking at the world with new eyes. She would do this when she stared at her father’s framed picture of her dead mother, a woman she could imagine to be perfect because she did not really remember her. Margaret wanted desperately to be like this perfect woman.
As she put her clothes back on, she thought about how different it was the last time she got engaged, without rings (for ideological reasons), to Andrew, who ended up throwing himself off his rich mother’s third-story balcony in a psychotic episode on Christmas. He didn’t die, but broke many bones in his back and neck, which necessitated a dangerous surgery and several months with a back brace. That Christmas, Margaret had gone to another state to visit her father for what she knew would be the last time, because of how bad his lung cancer had gotten. When Margaret heard what Andrew had done, she got in the car to drive back, saying goodbye to her father. When Margaret walked into the hospital room and saw Andrew lying there in a crumpled heap, slurring meaningless words through a mouth of broken teeth, she knew the relationship was over. If Andrew wanted to die, he clearly didn’t want to be with Margaret. But it didn’t end right away, because Margaret held a great sense of guilt inside her and also drew satisfaction from the fantasy that she could save someone. Andrew was now living alone in a weird house he built deep in the woods, not working, shooting deer and squirrels for food, and playing guitar.
Andrew would accidentally refer to the period after his suicide attempt as “After I died” rather than “After I tried to die,” which had worried Margaret. She would lie awake while Andrew slept, trying to pinpoint what exactly it was that had changed in him. It was true, some part of him had died, and something worse had taken its place. Andrew would jolt straight up in his sleep and scream. Margaret stopped having sex with him.
Since that time, Margaret had developed a new compulsion of repeating the phrase “I’m going to kill myself” approximately every sixty seconds in her mind. This was automatic: she did not do it on purpose, and she could not stop. She also developed involuntary, violent daydreams in which, instead of slitting her wrists, she cut her left arm off with an axe, then cut her right arm off as well, although her left arm was already detached and could not possibly hold an axe. It bothered her that this daydream did not make sense. At times when she felt particularly anxious, such as now, shivering in this cold and obviously-haunted apartment, these thoughts and daydreams increased in frequency until Margaret developed a piercing headache.
Margaret hurried out of the apartment, turning the ceiling fan off before she left.
James came home from work while Margaret sat on the edge of the bed, her arms outstretched in front of the space heater, the electric blanket he’d bought her to help with menstrual cramps on her lap. She was not menstruating, but was bleeding, she suddenly remembered, and she also felt very cold. “I’ve been sitting here for hours,” she said, sharpness in her voice. “I can’t get warm.” He sat next to her and kissed her cheek. “I accomplished nothing on my article today. It’s too cold,” she said. Margaret knew James thought she was too hard on herself. He probably thought now, since she was on a break, that she should take it easy, but she did not see it this way.
“It’s okay,” he said, stroking her hair. “How was the shower downstairs?”
“Bad. The hot water doesn’t work, only the cold. And everything’s dirty.” She did not tell him about the ceiling fan or the breathing. She couldn’t find the words to describe these things. She blinked in rapid succession. James always noticed when she did this. None of her other boyfriends had ever noticed. It was important to her that James noticed.
“Are you okay?” he asked her. He held her hand.
“Yes, I’m sorry. It was just really cold. I’m still cold.” James rubbed her arm. She thought of a story her father had told her the last time she saw him: that shortly after her mother died, when his anger problems were at their worst, he had gotten upset with Margaret for being too needy, grabbed her, and dislocated her arm. He took her to the hospital and they fixed her. I’ve never been so sorry for anything, he had said. It was the last bad thing I did. Margaret could think of a lot of bad things her father did, but she did not remember this story actually happening.
“Well, in that case,” said James, “I think I’ll wait until tomorrow. I need to look good for the jewelry store.” He smiled at her, then got another blanket from the closet and wrapped it around her shoulders. He kissed her. She felt lucky, and wondered if she should be less mean to him.
The next morning was even colder than the last, and Margaret and James took several minutes to get out of bed. It was painful to remove the blankets and walk away from the space heater into the kitchen to make coffee.
James was afraid of dark and unknown spaces, so Margaret entered the abandoned apartment first. James switched on the main light, so that the ceiling fan began once more to rotate. Margaret felt like a sharp, metal instrument inside her was beginning to
turn, catching her organs on its edges and pulling them in the wrong directions. James put his hands over his ears as if he heard a loud screaming. “I do not like it in here,” he said.
“Exactly,” said Margaret.
James got in the shower, turned on the cold water, and screamed. “I don’t think I can do this,” he said. “Your pain tolerance must be higher than mine.”
Margaret got in with him. They shivered, but together they laughed.
As they climbed the stairs outside back to the top floor, Margaret noticed a single icicle hanging off the roof. It was pathetic compared to the icicles she had gotten used to growing up in another state, sharp icicles several feet long hanging off the roof of her father’s house, threatening to crash onto Margaret when she walked underneath them, returning from school. This icicle was cute in a disgusting way, like a teenager’s dangling rhinestone earring. She thought of diamonds. Her understanding was that diamonds were strong, just like, ideally, the love of an engaged couple. Diamonds were strong enough to cut glass, and they lasted forever. This was why engagement rings featured diamonds. That and because they were expensive, thus proving the man’s dedication to the woman. Traditionally, proving to the woman’s father that the man had enough money to take care of her. Margaret thought this was a load of capitalist crap, and that it was also sexist. The ring was supposed to signal to other men that the woman was taken, but the man was not expected to wear a ring until marriage. Despite his faults, there were things Andrew had understood about Margaret that James never would.
Margaret held the door open for James at the jewelry store, waiting for him to go inside first, even though she knew he always insisted she go first. They stood there gesturing at each other for several moments while sophisticated store employees waited to greet them. Margaret averted her eyes. “Hi!” said a middle-aged woman wearing a lot of makeup and no wedding ring. “What can I help you with today?”
The Paper Garden Page 3
