1972
Her mouth open as she worked the tweezers in the motel bathroom mirror, her son in the next room sleeping ragged through a sinus infection, she removed her eyelashes one by one. It had been a year, more. She wanted to hang it on her vanity, the explosion, and was telling herself the story of that. On the counter was a twist-tied bag of sea salt she had bought for him to gargle with, in the garbage can the four Band-Aids she’d excised from her feet, pea green and puce, detritus of a lost battle. There were the blisters, then the fungal infection she had developed in her toenails, something she tried to hide from him. Some were half an inch thick and crumbled like old pastry.
A feeling of cleanliness now lasted a minute, less. Even the drip of water down her back seemed to know something about her, what she’d done, who was dead. Of all people, a schoolteacher with the flu. It was possible not only her physical health had been compromised, she admitted. Her hand had brushed away cockroaches from places they were not. The old thoughts of suicide had returned, a little changed, fantasies that more resembled memories in how long they went—it was as if she could remember killing herself, but also the placidity of the world after, how her leaving had bettered it.
She removed them one by one, the only light the pale three P.M. gray that came in through the window. The idea was to transfer the fear of people looking at her onto them, make them afraid of staring too long. In the foyer of the last diner she’d been brave enough to enter, the poster of her face was a nightmare that swelled in tinny horror when she saw it also included him, his passport photo, age nine and a half. He had looked for most of his life like someone just stolen from sleep.
Freed from her eyelids, they fell to the wan pink of the plastic and curled there. A lifetime ago or two, on the high wooden benches of Union Station, her mother holds a palm out to her, the little black comma upon it, and asks her to wish.
With her top right lid done, she blinked once to clear away any she’d missed and began on the bottom.
Her thin feet flat on the cold floor, she stands in the center of the circle of Randy and Oz and Annabelle and the others. Do you think because you’re beautiful you will be an exception?
Her son had not spoken to her in seventy-two hours, and the last word he’d said was no. The question she’d posed him was How can I make this time more tolerable for you? She had not talked with her sister in almost seven years, a fact that did not feel separate from the fact that Charlie had been dead for five. If she were brave enough, she thought, if she were limitless in feeling, some communication would be possible anyway. Their last conversation had ended in a kind of threat—Call me when you’re sober—and Charlie never did, maybe never was. The second movement of grief was less violent, a feeling of stupidity that barked occasionally at the fence it couldn’t cross. In the year since the explosion, she had carried Charlie’s letters everywhere and reread them in empty bathtubs, marking up lines and paragraphs as though to make the message new. Her sister waves from her horse, she underhands a can across the pool.
One whole eye lashless, she felt the child’s pride in taking a punishment without upset. Here are her parents, a look exchanged across folded hands, shocked by how little it bothers her to be sent to her room. Being alone had never frightened her enough: she had never outright believed what the world would have her, that she was measured by who she was to other people. That was vanity, too, she thought, her eyes weeping at the pain now—her belief that she was an invention of herself alone.
She had said, to the reedy male voice on the phone, that she would have to think about it, although she knew she had no better option. She was interested in what they could want from her in the way she might be in a shop window, a fantasy constructed in her absence, adjustments in tone and color already made. The Shelter member who’d relayed the details had offered few, then hung up—a name that was unfamiliar, an organization she hadn’t heard of because it had not, until very recently, existed. She had waited four days to call, or two, what constituted a day now transformed by the parentheses of sleep that had become irregular.
No, Wright had said, an answer less to what she had asked and more to his whole life, his feeling about it. Going to disappear, he had whispered in his sleep one night, a threat that frightened her so much she had turned on all the lights and the television.
Her eyes done, she began on her brows. It was not for other people—that was a lie. She could recognize them more quickly now, the parts of her thinking that were designed to appease.
It was not for other people. It was for herself, it was to be kept from mirrors. It was to remind her how ugly she was. She remembered his wife speaking the word, by the pool of the inn. Elise turns to her, smoke pouring from her mouth. Can you imagine what this does to mirrors?
She had not known she was going to call until the moment appeared, ripe, easier than the alternative of stepping back outside into the winter. A pay phone inside a heated garage, just visible through the door behind the gas station cash register, the mechanic, in a T-shirt improbably white, who, when she asked, spread a burnished hand and welcomed her back.
Inside the booth the plastic was milky, on the blond wood bench a slight recession, the place where people had gripped it while they called home to report on the cost of the damages. She believed the receiver would ignite when she spoke her name. The men who’d come for her were inevitable, and she imagined them all day, Navy uniforms moving toward her in formation.
“This is Fay,” she said. It had been four months or six since she’d spoken it.
“We’re so glad to hear from you,” the voice said. Already the conversation was familiar, the confidence of the synecdoche, the young man speaking slowly for many. Their long acronym he explained to her with a green zeal that put her in mind of her age—she was thirty-three, older than she had ever imagined becoming. Her fantasy of herself had concluded.
They wanted to populate the last Apollo launch, he said, with images of the people who had suffered under the American hegemony. Vietnamese children, women who wasted their lives as men’s secretaries, the assassinated members of the Black Panthers, the students slain at Kent State.
“We are against racism and repression,” he said. “We are against misogyny and capitalism and war.”
“How about plastics,” she said.
“What?”
“Are you against those, too? Hundreds of years to degrade, some of them never. Might be room for one more letter in your title. Tack a P on there.”
He did not laugh and she did not apologize. There was the phrase smash the era that failed us, there was her imagination of how he looked as he spoke, crossing an austere apartment, books the only clutter, his slim finger purple with the cord wrapped around it. There would be other people in unraveling sweaters, mouths open as if to indicate what he said to her came from their mouths, too. She did not mention how he and the young people who admired him were not the first to make this connection, between the war on this world and the spectacular fight for others. The black reverend who had marched with two hundred people and twenty mule-drawn carts to Vincent’s launch, the signs about how the program money could be spent.
“We want you to be the face,” he said, “to give the talk. We were inspired by your early work in Ecuador. It could only be you,” he said. “What we need is an icon.”
She did not point out the contradiction, the space between only and an.
There were three weeks until the launch. She asked for time. The mechanic, glancing at her occasionally when he emerged from inside a propped hood, mimed a flapping mouth with his hand and grinned, misunderstanding the look on her face for some domestic exasperation. In return she waved, high and tight, which she knew was not quite the right gesture. She had been too long removed from the codex of them, the small things people did with their bodies to signal respect for each other. The weather out there, the smell inside, the danger ahead.
That had been five days before, a number she was certain about. Time had tightened for her again, snapped into efficiency under what she was going to do. She had turned her curiosity toward an end and it was an incredible comfort, warm, forgiving of everything that had led to it.
The faucet running, she swiped a wet hand towel along the counter until it was clean. Back in the room, all she wanted was to crawl into the tight cheap bedding and sleep with her son, but she knew she needed to be awake when he saw what she’d done to herself, to explain it. The bigger piece of your promise as a mother was your ability to interpolate, rush before the oncoming menace and explain the ways its shadow was shorter than it seemed. Of course, she was the thing with the shadow now, the threat to be explained. Without the frame of lashes surrounding them, the slate of her eyes took on the quality of something abandoned to the elements, part the color of what they were but more the color of what they saw. Waiting, she left the television off, the curtains drawn, the water that fell from her body where it pooled.
He woke up twenty minutes after the sun went down, his eyes adjusting to the change in light at the same time they adjusted to the change to her face. Two hours had passed and she could barely explain what she’d done to herself, now, let alone Wright. In the first years of his life, her parents had often mentioned how strange it was—that he did not really resemble her.
“You’re out of your mind,” he said, passing a hand over his face in an adult way she had not taught him. From the dresser he took her rollies and a violet plastic lighter and stepped outside, a book under his arm, almost thirteen and a person without her. She said nothing when she passed him on the balcony, just handed him the hat he’d forgotten.
On the way to the pay phone she looked in the rooms she could, gnarled feet crossed daintily on the made beds, shirts thrown over lamps to make the light another color. She descended a set of freestanding steps, concrete fixed with glitter, like so much of the country both hideous and unremarkable.
“Yes,” she said to the voice on the phone. Fay believed she could see his hand, how it brought the others in the room closer to the receiver. In the news that had not stopped reading, the polls were clear. The majority of Americans were for withdrawal, and of those who disapproved of the war, the great part disapproved of people like her. In the month between Philadelphia and New York they had received a letter from a priest imprisoned for burning draft cards, a man with a face so long and noble that his pacifist message seemed painted on it. He worried Shelter had become what it wanted to eradicate. Shouldn’t a revolution, he had written, differ vastly, in action and feeling, from the forces it hopes to dismantle? Annabelle, in the days before she died, had mocked it, quoting it with her hands folded behind her back in the way of a clergyman.
In the year since the bomb, Fay had taken to speaking their names aloud, Oz, Annabelle, Charlie. What did you say, her son had whispered, any time he heard this, as bitter about her degeneration as he was afraid.
The metal cord snaking around her wrist, she watched a man by the vending machines push his forearm up inside it to a Snickers that was caught. What Fay planned to do she did not tell them, then or ever. She would be part of their message and distinct from it. The voice on the phone began to talk about the speech she would deliver, and she alluded to the safety of the line.
Under all thoughts, her son. In leaving hers, she would give him his life.