IN A CAR CULTURE, YOU ARE WHAT YOU DRIVE. You knew all about that living in L.A. Hollywood was like the high school parking lot magnified for the silver screen. You drove a supercool sports car and told People magazine you cruised the highways alone at night. It helped you clear your head. My parents had given me a new Saab (black—my father thought all cars should be black), and as soon as I passed my road test I started driving back and forth on Middle Neck Road, breezing past the manicured yards and temples and private turnoffs bursting with bushy green trees, cruising along Northern Boulevard into Queens and stopping at the diner for a grilled cheese and chocolate shake. I got on the L.I.E. and drove past the airports, Shea Stadium, the globe from the World’s Fair, the old staple factory where workertrolls bent metal deep into the night, and sometimes I made it to the Midtown Tunnel and into Manhattan, where I spent my last summer on the outside working at an ad agency, filing papers, answering phones, making color Xeroxes of storyboards. They called it an internship.
All summer long I drove, stopping for long stretches at night in front of Edie’s house, but she wasn’t inside. “She’s still in Ohio,” her mother said, when she came to the door in her sweatpants, her face and eyes puffed out as if she hadn’t slept for days, and Ohio became a mythical place, as far-off as the planet Andromeda. Where Edie had gone to “rest” after Los Angeles. And every time I crossed her front lawn, hopping over the revolving sprinkler, my sneakers slipping through the wet grass, crickets yapping their heads off, I tried to think of something to tell her mother that didn’t sound like I was making excuses.
I went over and over it in my mind, drew storyboard sketches—sometimes I could only get stuff out in my book. Edie’d been giving me shit about it that afternoon. We sat in the window of a touristy bar on Melrose, waiting for Chuck and drinking more coffee since the waitress wouldn’t serve us beer. My international student ID card didn’t cut it out there; people obeyed the law. Not like New York where you got points for ingenuity. Edie’d opened up the local paper and was reciting all the places we could go later if we had a car. I took out my book and charcoal pencils and started sketching our morning on the set. I wanted to remember your eyes, the way they’d locked onto mine. That old guy Mickey had taught me about faces, but it was harder working from memory than videotape. Maybe I’d have to wait a few weeks to get that scene before finishing. In the top corner of the page, I started outlining big black circles with bright lights inside. Edie grabbed my wrist. “What are you doing?” she asked, and I looked at her like, what the fuck do you think? “Don’t give me that face, I know what you’re doing, but what is it with you? I’m trying to figure out a plan for us and you’re not helping at all. I don’t get you, you just sit there with that stupid book.” She tried to wrangle it from me, but I held on with both hands.
“Let go!” I said.
“You’ve been carrying that thing around since I met you”—she twisted our hands with the book off the table, huffing—“don’t you think it’s time I saw it?”
“Get out of here!” I pulled harder, standing up out of my seat for leverage. Edie squinted. A shadow moved up beside her.
“Hey, ladies,” said a chubby guy with curly black hair and thick stubble on his cheeks. “What’s all this?”
“Depends.” Edie spit out her words, not letting up on the book. “Who are you?”
“Just someone who cares.”
“You got a car?”
“Of course.”
She smiled and let go.
The guy said his name was Rex and he was a consultant for a nightclub. He said he would take us there that night. He said he and his friends would pick us up, and I knew it was pointless to argue when Edie gave him Aunt Fifi’s address.
They showed up around ten, three guys in jeans and boots and T-shirts. They smelled of wet newspaper and cigarettes and carried a couple of six-packs. One of them was missing two fingers. Another had skin stretched so thin across his face he looked like a Halloween mask. They could have been anywhere from twenty to forty, and I’m no expert, but they didn’t look like consultants. None of this bothered Edie, who invited them in and poured beers into tall glasses. We smoked some and talked about Aunt Fifi’s house and the city and how it was so different from New York, though none of them had ever been there. They’d heard about the crime. The skeleton seemed overly interested in me. Edie winked when he sat down and stretched his arm out behind me. He asked what we were doing in L.A. “We came to see a taping of World Without End,” I said.
“That’s not why we came!” Edie rolled her eyes at me. “Some TV friends hooked us up. They said, ‘If you’re going to be in L.A. you have to come to the set.’ You know how that is … but we really came to party.”
“Well, you came to the right place,” said Rex. He took a long hit off a joint and held it in. I couldn’t believe he was sitting on Aunt Fifi’s couch, he looked so out of place among the ancient treasures, like if my father in his designer suits were to find himself working in a coal mine. Something about this felt really wrong.
“So, where are we going tonight?” Edie asked, and they said they had a special place in mind. They said it was the hottest club in the city. They talked about all the movie people who hung out there.
“Have you ever seen Brooke Harrison there?” I asked.
“Who?” said my guy, his hand tightening around the upper part of my shoulder.
“She’s on World Without End.”
“Nope,” he said and gripped me harder; my arm felt paralyzed. “Never heard of her.”
I inched a few feet back on the couch, thinking, These guys are bullshit. You and John Strong went out all the time. Everyone in Hollywood knew you. I tried backing up a bit more, but the skeleton pressed into me. “There’s too many of them, you know?” he said. “And they’re all stupid bitches when you get right down to it. Wanna kiss me?”
“Um … I can’t … I have something …” Stammering, I managed to get halfway off the couch.
“Come on, baby, just relax,” he yanked my arm. “We’re gonna have fun tonight, we’re going to the club. We can dance. Don’t you like to dance?”
“No.” I jumped up and saw Edie sitting at the player piano with Rex and the fingerless guy squishing her from both sides. They were pounding the keys, but no sound came out. I ran into Aunt Fifi’s bedroom and locked the door behind me.
A few minutes later Edie knocked. “Come on, Lil,” she pounded, “we’re getting ready to go.”
“I’m not going.”
“What!? Stop being such a loser and open this door!”
This went on for some time, her demanding I open the door and me saying no. Finally, I relented and let her in, again locking the door behind us. “Don’t do this, okay?” she pleaded. “It’s too fucked-up. You know, you are so spoiled. You want everything handed to you on a silver platter. You think your dream guy is just going to plop himself down in front of you? Well, let me tell you, that ain’t gonna happen. I mean, look at you. You’re a total freak!”
“Shut up!”
“No, you shut up! I can’t believe how ungrateful you are. Once again I’m practically delivering opportunity to your goddamn doorstep and you’re acting like I’m a criminal or something.”
“Those guys are jerks. They don’t know the first thing about Hollywood.”
“They know more than you do, they live here. And they’ve got connections. Maybe we’ll even see your little soap star.”
“He didn’t know who she was.”
“You asked him? Jesus fucking Christ, what did I tell you? You’re going to ruin this thing before it even starts, you always do …” I sat down on the bed, crossing my arms in front of me. Edie came up next to me and rested her hand on my thigh. It felt like cement. “Okay, look, I’m sorry,” she said, taking another tack. “You’re right, these guys are probably idiots, but they’re going to take us out. Do you want to go back to New York and say, ‘Yeah, I was in L.A. and all I saw was the inside of a TV studio’? Well, I don’t want to say that, so please, Lil, just do this one little thing. Is that so much to ask, after all I’ve done for you?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head back and forth.
“Please …”
“I’m not going.”
“Don’t make me do this alone,” she said, a strain I’d never heard in her voice. Like she was trying to convince me to donate a kidney to save her mother’s life or something. Might have worked before that afternoon, before I’d seen you on the set. But we’d really clicked and the last thing I wanted was for you to catch me running around with a bunch of hooligans (that’s what my grandmother would have called them). Image was everything in this town.
Edie begged and begged. She offered to get me pot from the Ayatollah when we got home, told me she’d buy me the pants I wanted from Reminiscence, said she’d do anything, and still I wouldn’t budge. “God, you’re so stubborn!”
“I’m sorry … I just can’t.”
“You mean you won’t.” She stood up and turned toward me, pointing her finger in my face. “Okay, Lil, if that’s the way you want it, fine. But don’t come crawling back to me ever again. We’re through.”
“Oh, come on, Edie.”
“I mean it. You and me, we’re kaput. Finito.”
“It’s just one night.”
“‘Quoth the raven, nevermore!’”
She sauntered off in that tight black evening gown, slamming the door behind her. Outside I could hear her saying she’d be going alone tonight, her friend had come down with something, and one of them, I think it was the skeleton, shouted something about a case of bitchitis. I got up and locked the door. Returned to the bed, steaming mad as I listened to the shuffling of their departure, sounds I’d heard a million times listening from my room at home. The shutting off of this, the picking up of that, one last trip to the bathroom, glasses placed in the sink … there was still time. Someone always forgot something, and it took a few minutes to get settled in the car outside. I could unlock the door and make everything all right, but fuck her! I had just as much right to demand she stay home with me. Only the second I heard the car turn over, I felt the blood rush out of me, my stomach an empty valley.
I ran outside and caught a couple of brake lights down the street. “Edie!” I trudged a few more feet, shouting and waving my arms, but the car turned. Shit, I thought … shit! I smoked a couple cigs in the wet night, when it finally hit me: I had the keys to the sea-green Buick buried in my jeans, I’d taken driver’s ed. I could try and find them.
The car never started, and I slammed my fist against the dashboard the way I’d jabbed my knuckles into the mirror of my parents’ bathroom the night I discovered Blair was gone for good. They all left after a while. But knowing that didn’t make anything any easier. The bottom of my hand throbbing, I pounded until the glove compartment popped open, and inside it was a gun. Or what looked like a toy gun, almost; I’d never seen a real one up close.
I picked it up, and it wasn’t at all weaponlike. Shiny silver with an ivory handle, no bigger than Edie’s metal pipe in the palm of my hand, this gun couldn’t be real, could it? It was more like the pistols I’d seen saloon girls tuck into their satin underwear in the Old West town, although they could have been real, too. That was all about re-creation, authenticity. I dug further into the glove compartment and discovered a powder-blue Tiffany bag full of bullets. More than fifty of them. I lined up a few on the dashboard like tiny missiles or lipsticks in a department store, the oily, metal-y smell snaking up my nose, then inspected one in my hand. Smaller than my pinkie, it had a gray tip and copper body, and at the base said norma and .38 SPECIAL. Of course, Norma was Marilyn and .38 Special a weird country-rock band, and although I had a feel ing the bullet had been around before either one of them, I wanted to show Edie how everything connected with everything else, but she was off somewhere in the thick of it, and when she finally did return hours later, so mangled, her eyes puffed up like balloons with makeup smeared all over them, I was thankful I’d tucked the gun inside my belt. I’d first heard a car door slam, footsteps, then the triple ring of the bell out front. Opening the door, I found what was left of Edie: A bloody crack split her lips. Her nose was large and disjointed, big yellow circles under her eyes. Aunt Fifi’s dress barely clung to her body. Her hair smelled like cat piss. It made me want to puke. “Are you okay?” I said, and she gazed right through me. “Edie!” I reached for her shoulder, but she brushed me off. “We should go to a hospital or something. You’re so … I’m calling Gustave, okay?”
“You really missed out tonight,” she said, walking right by me like she’d really had the time of her life. The wind blew in after her, then I heard a humanlike rustling in the bushes. I grabbed the gun from my belt and ran outside, scared shitless but no way was I letting anyone fuck with her again. I circled the house, went down the driveway and out to the street, the gun leading the way for me—it was all clear. I ran back inside, bolting the door behind me, and found Edie in the bathroom, wetting a clean white washcloth with hot water and dabbing her face. Within seconds the cloth was stained with blood and makeup. Pink water flushed down the sink. I felt sick to my stomach and suggested again that we call Gustave. “It was so fun.” She talked slowly into the mirror, her lower lip so thick she could barely pronounce the consonants. She mumbled something that I swear sounded like “life experience,” and then set the washcloth over her face.
“Edie.” I put my free hand on her shoulder, and she flinched.
“Get off!” she shouted from underneath the terry-cloth veil.
“But I’m—”
She shook her head back and forth.
“—so sorry.”
She pushed her arm into me and the cloth fell off her face. I stood there, my left hand reaching out to her and the Smith & Wesson in my right, sure she’d say something. But she just turned and picked up the washcloth, then shouted, “Get out!”
“But—”
“OUT! OUT! OUT!”
And they were the last words she spoke to me. Even at the airport she sat motionless, her mouth smothered in lipstick, every inch of her face ghosted with white powder, her eyes doused with mascara and shadow, and every time I remembered how long she’d stayed in that bathroom while I sat by the window clinging to the gun in the palm of my hand, just in case those assholes decided to come back, I shivered imagining how much putting on all that crap must have hurt. When the car service dropped her off, she didn’t even say goodbye.
Every time I called, her mom said she’s still gone, it’s a lot to work through, and I wondered whether she was part of the coverup, but when school started again, it was Edie who wouldn’t come to the door or return my calls. If we passed each other in the hall, she quickly looked the other way. It was terrible. Like I creeped her out or something. I stopped sleeping. Spent entire nights watching reruns and drawing storyboards like the ones I’d Xeroxed at the ad agency, cartoon panels of what might have happened to Edie in L.A. One somehow surfaced in People—a joyride ending in a circle of steel-toe boots in Edie’s face. The experts said it was so violent for a girl. I think they thought Edie was you.
My eyes swelled up and stung like bug bites. I wore sunglasses all the time, enjoying the dark shadows my world had become. Nancy stopped me in the kitchen one day and pulled up the glasses. She stared directly into my eyes. “What?” I said.
“Nothing.”
“I’m not stoned.”
“I know.” She set the glasses back on my nose and took a few steps back toward the refrigerator, a fart of Chanel lingering behind her. “I wish you were, sometimes.”
“What?”
“Maybe it would explain things. Your SATs came back.”
“Oh …”
“The math is still terrible. I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
“It doesn’t matter, I don’t want to go to college,” I said to her ass. She was bent over the refrigerator, the back of her skirt unzipped so I could see her crack inside her stockings, a backward robber’s nose. It was so gross the way she walked around the house in her unbuttoned shirt and stockings, everything just hanging out. I wished she would buy some sweats like the ones Edie’s mom wore.
Nancy turned, caressing a carafe of iced coffee. “There’s another test in December,” she said.
“I’m not taking it.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake.”
“It doesn’t matter if I’m not going to college.”
“You’re going to college. Everyone goes to college.”
“For your information, Nancy, everyone doesn’t go to college.” I was thinking of you, how you hadn’t even finished high school before you got the role on the soap.
“True.” She landed the carafe on the counter between us. It was sweating at the neck. “You want to clean houses or type for a living, they taught you how to type, right? Or you could always work at McDonald’s.”
Whenever anyone wanted to show you how awful life could be, they mentioned working at McDonald’s. What did that say about the hundreds of thousands of people who worked there? They couldn’t all have such lousy lives, and it didn’t seem worse than any other job as long as I didn’t have to work the grill. My skin was bad enough already. Anyway, I was going to do something creative. “Brooke Harrison never went to college,” I said.
“Who?”
“You know … from World.”
Nancy burst out laughing. “You’re comparing yourself to someone on a soap opera? That’s ridiculous. I don’t know where you get this stuff sometimes. Brooke Harrison was training for TV while you were still riding your Big Wheel, and look, nobody would ever accuse her of being a good actress, but she’s got some talent.”
“I have talent. You don’t even know.”
“Oh come on, Lily, we’re talking about real talent here, not your little pictures.” Nancy poured herself a tall glass of iced coffee, and we watched the shit-brown liquid roll over the ice cubes, cracking like the synapses in my brain. I thought it was going to explode, an aneurysm of Nancy-hate. She’d be sorry when I was famous and I told the press my mother was dead.
She added skim milk and two packets of Sweet’N Low to her coffee, then pivoted, drink in hand as if she were hosting a cocktail party, before launching into her usual speech: Maybe if I stopped trying to convince myself I was so different from everybody else I could think a little bit about my future, and if I didn’t want to take the SATs again, fine, we would work with these scores, at least the verbal was okay, and I had that internship at the ad agency and good references from my art teachers (even without talent). But, she said, I really needed to start thinking about getting into a good school or else I wouldn’t have a prayer of grad school and I’d end up working you-know-where. Only the reverse—better scores, better schools, a good job (like hers? she sold houses!)—didn’t seem much different.
She left me so bummed out I drove into the dark, waterlogged afternoon. It had been raining on and off for days, turning the fallen leaves into a soggy brown mattress. My wheels splashed through puddle after puddle, but inside I stayed warm and dry, thinking, what crack-up weather, the beginning of a bad story … on a dark and foggy suburban road … good to be in a high-performance vehicle. Jack had said, “Those Swedes make the safest cars in the world. If we were hawking them I’d get that into the spot for sure.” I could storyboard it for you to star. I’d been compiling tapes of your scenes on World, studying your movements, gestures, and expressions. I knew your kisses, your crying jags, your angst, and, of course, your prayers, now that you’d seen the light and were training to become a nun. We could have made some serious cash from the tapes, you know? There was always someone in Babbling ’Bout Brooke pleading for Jaymie Jo montages, that’s where I got the idea. But you didn’t want me to sell them.
Red lights screamed: Stop! I slammed on the brakes, just missing the station wagon in front of me. Safest car in the world!
Turning my head, I realized I was on Nirvana Avenue, right by school, and wasn’t that the cruelest joke? To build a high school on a path called Nirvana? But it also led to the turnoff for Edie’s house, so I figured what the hell, I’d go and see if she might come to the door this time, but when I arrived there was another car in my favorite spot across the street: the old Chevy. Alone, Bobby Davis sat with his elbow folded in the open window, listening to loud music. I nuzzled up my Saab and, from a button by the driver’s seat, slid down the other window. “Hey, Bobby,” I said.
He leaned a bit further out the window, and boy was he different. About twenty pounds heavier and thicker all over, his blond waves had been cut so short he looked like the guys at the military academy. “Yo, Speck, long time no see,” he said, and there was something sweet about how he called me by my last name.
“S’pose you got a message for me,” he said.
“For you? I don’t think so.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“I … I’m just … wait, what are you doing here?”
“Waiting for her to break,” he said, and his steely gray eyes clouded over. They were red around the edges and bloodshot. He’d always looked like he had pink eye, but that day he was even more teary. “She can’t ignore me forever, you know?”
I must have smiled.
“What? What’s so fucking funny?”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking.”
“You want her to talk to me?”
“No, me. She’s ignoring me, too.”
“You? But I thought—”
“Since Los Angeles.”
“What the fuck happened out there?”
“I’m not sure exactly, but it was really bad.”
“A’right, follow me. Let’s go somewhere else, this feels too weird.”
He turned over the Chevy and skidded out into the damp streets. There was nothing for me to do but join him. I hadn’t hung out with anyone in months, not even in smokers’ corner, which had been overrun by kids who seemed way too young for cigarettes, and I’d been dying to talk to somebody about Edie. So I followed Bobby past the train tracks in the misty, wet twilight, trying to remember an old Middle Eastern saying we’d been hearing a lot of since they discovered the president’s men were involved in arms deals over there. It went something like this: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Crime is a very slippery slope.
When I was in seventh grade they called us into the auditorium to watch a movie about smoking pot. It was full of creepy music and had all of these reformed junkies, prostitutes, and thieves, dressed up like hippies, telling us how everything bad started after they’d smoked their first joint. The narrator said listen carefully: These people were living proof marijuana led to harder drugs. And some of the girls who’d smoked ended up pregnant.
Everyone laughed at the movie. Like it could never happen to us—but I’d smoked my first joint the year before and had been pinching buds from Jack’s drawer ever since. How quickly I’d gone from smoking to stealing. Maybe the hippie addicts had a point. (Note to the president and first lady: If you’d like to use me in your war on drugs, feel free. Just be aware I don’t agree with you on anything else.) The way I see it, my theft and possession of a weapon put me in the big league, criminologically speaking. If I hadn’t lifted that gun and blue bag full of bullets and rolled each one in a pair of jeans, the way Edie’d packed up her pipe and hid it in her suitcase on the way out, then maybe I’d have no need to scratch these words across endless pages of yellow legal pads. I can’t tell you exactly why I took it, but after spending the early morning hours sitting at the windowsill with the gun in my hand, almost wishing those guys’d come back for another round, I wanted that gun. It had become a part of me, the only thing separating me from what happened to Edie out there. I think I knew all along that it wasn’t even loaded.
Bobby Davis taught me how to shoot, just like he said in his deposition. He might have been a high school dropout and a pothead, but he was never delusional, just sad. He reminded me of your boyfriend, John Strong. In an interview you said John was like a giant cat, who, missing his mother, kneaded his claws into everything. I guess most guys were like that.
It was always dark with Bobby, past daylight savings and damp and woody. He never called or came by my house, he was just there in the parking lot after school, waiting like all the older guys who dated high school girls. I followed him along the highways and boulevards, driving through parks and shopping malls and cemeteries and golf courses—Long Island had it all and everything looked different in autumn, when the day people stopped coming and the air smelled like a muddy T-shirt. We always took two cars so we weren’t really together. But Edie couldn’t have missed it, if she’d cared enough to look—the Saab and the Chevy, you couldn’t get much different in looks, personality, bod. He always wanted to talk about her and kept asking me to replay the same story like it was a flashback on a soap. It was okay until he started looking for someone to blame.
“How could you just let her go off? What were you thinking?” he asked me again and again, and I had no answer, at least nothing I could put into words. “You say she was your best friend. You were supposed to watch her back, it’s an unwritten code, a philosophy.”
“She told me we were through,” I defended myself. “She broke the code.”
“Did you ever smell her?”
“No,” I lied.
“She always smelled like grape bubble gum.”
“Yeah, I guess … she was like a funky purple grape.”
Her smell was more flowery perfume and antiperspirant, but she did have a grapey aura, and I wanted Bobby to see I was paying attention. Guys liked girls who were fun, funny, and supportive. I’d read that in Teen magazine. I bought packs of grape bubble gum and left them on my dashboard. He never noticed. But he liked my tape deck. We used to open the front doors of my car and listen to Frank Zappa while we sat on the hood of his Chevy off the Meadowbrook Parkway, smoking pot and watching the cars stream by in the misty twilight, a net of moist brown pine needles beneath our feet. (Even now, where the only pine scent comes in Mimi’s metal bucket, the smell makes me hum Zappa songs.) Bobby loved Zappa; over a couple of afternoons I’d painted his face in oils on the back of Bobby’s jacket. He said it looked just like the album. It made him smile. He liked that Zappa sang about Jewish girls and Catholic girls and dancing and screwing and jamming, and he wasn’t afraid to curse and lose airplay. We never listened to the radio, except when the World Series started, even though Bobby said baseball was a wussy-ass sport, and that seemed so antisocial, so un-American. I could see why Edie’d had such a crush on him. The thing is, I had no idea he’d liked her so much. He never bought her feather roach clips or made her personalized mix tapes like the Ayatollah did, and always acted like he could take her or leave her. He must have known she had other boyfriends.
My father was at game seven. He’d been calling in favors all over town when it started looking like there would be a game seven. I imagined him sucking down hot dogs and plastic cups of beer as he cheered the team he’d followed since they joined the National League. For weeks, he’d been running around the house with his fist in the air shouting, “The ’86 Mets!” They hadn’t won a Series since 1969, the year I was born. When I was a kid and we used to go to games, he liked telling me how he’d watched that entire Series on a small color TV with me, a three-month-old baby, in his lap. I didn’t cry once, he said. I was never a big crier.
Bobby let the game run at longer intervals that last night, although he wanted to hear the Zappa song about a Jewish princess. It reminded him of Edie. He was about to rewind the tape so we could hear it again, when he leaned out of the passenger seat of my car. “Where the fuck did you get this?” he said, Aunt Fifi’s pistol in his hand, looking tinier than ever.
“Be careful, it’s an antique.” I slid off the hood of his car and went to grab it, but he dangled it over my head. “Come on, give it back.”
He laughed. “This can’t be yours.”
I lunged at him and practically fell over. “Please … you’re gonna break it!” I said. I’d lugged that gun all the way back from Los Angeles, took the name tag off my luggage. If it had been discovered I was going to eat the baggage claim check.
Bobby clicked open the barrel, spinning it a few times, a disturbing smile on his face. “It’s not loaded. What good’s it gonna do you if it’s not loaded?”
Evening made his face whiter, and more eerie. From the car came the announcer’s voice and organ music and thousands of people shouting, “Charge!” Something good was happening at the game.
“Let me guess, it’s just for show.”
“No,” I huffed. He fit the barrel back, took a few steps forward, and held the gun in front of him like a TV cop about to say, Freeze!
“See, this is exactly why girls and guns don’t mix,” he said, and pulled the trigger. It sounded like the click of a seat belt. “Girls are total pussies. You got no backbone. When God took that rib outta Adam to make Eve there was nothing to connect it to. He had to improvise, use sand or something, and as a result you’re weak. The whole lot of you. This is why girls follow guys all over the place.”
“I don’t see Edie following you anywhere.”
He pivoted back and slammed me up against his car, the nose of the gun at my cheek. “Don’t you talk about her like that, you hear me? You ruined her!” The gun slid down to my neck. Bobby shoved it under my throat and pushed his body into me, hard. He smelled stale, like bad cheese. “You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Yes what?” he said, the gun practically choking me.
I spit out the words as best as I could: “I understand.”
“Understand what?”
“It’s all my fault.”
“That’s better.” He backed off, and we were both heaving, tiny breath clouds sailing between us. “You’re lucky,” he said. “I’m in a good mood tonight. Let’s see if we can’t beat the odds, show you how to use this thing. You got any bullets?”
I directed him toward the glove compartment and blue Tiffany bag, then watched as he loaded and unloaded the gun, explaining about the barrel, the bullets, the safety. He told me the safety was my personal bodyguard, as long as it was on nothing bad could happen, and I felt, well, safe. He showed me how to stand coplike, feet planted directly under my hips, arms extended in front of me, one hand on the gun, the other gripping it from below for extra support on the kickback. It was much heavier when loaded, even with Bobby’s hands over mine. He clicked off the safety and whispered, “Ready?”
I pulled the trigger and immediately slid back into Bobby’s chest, the shot ringing through my head like a hundred cars backfiring, the scent of fireworks overwhelming the wet leaves and Bobby’s boy smells. His hands still guiding mine, he said do it again, and I pulled the trigger, getting better at balancing myself with every shot, although I had no idea what we were shooting at. It was too dark off the parkway, and we’d shut off the interior lights of our cars. Bobby said the noise would attract enough attention. Nobody saw us, but after Bobby’d taken a few shots of his own, a chorus of honks blew through the swish of red and white lights. Someone, somewhere, shouted, “Let’s go Mets!” I grabbed the gun from Bobby and emptied the barrel into the cloudy black sky.
“Easy, now.” He came up behind me.
“They’re winning.”
“You happy?”
I turned around and saw the outline of his face, the white of his eyes. “It’s about time they won a Series.”
“Not that.” He nudged the side of my body closest to the gun in my hand.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said, more nervous than I’d been shooting. Even in the dark I could feel him looking at me, the kind of look that made me think of people waiting to order food at McDonald’s. He took a step closer and his chin almost rested on my head. I leaned back against my car or his, I’d lost my bearings, and he moved into me like we’d been with the gun, only this time we were face to face. When he kissed me I didn’t fight it. I pretended I knew what I was doing wrapped up in the softness of his lips and wondered if they were all like this. Loose and wet. Spit kept trickling down my chin. A few times he tried to get his fingers underneath my shirt and each time I pushed them back. I didn’t like him touching me. He broke away and exhaled through puffed out cheeks. Like a little boy. Then he traced his right hand along my arm until he came to the gun and pulled it between us. I felt the metal more intensely through his fingers, his eyes mining me for clues the way he’d picked my brains about Edie. He massaged my hands over the gun, and that’s when it hit me: I could shoot him if I wanted to, he’d just taught me how. He couldn’t fuck with me and he knew it. “You really like it,” he said, and I smiled. We were on the same wavelength. “Here, how about this?” he said, and, using both sets of our hands, shoved the gun in the back pocket of my army pants. He let go of me, I heard his belt clink.
“Well?” he said.
“Well what?”
“Come here.” He took my hands again, and it was okay. I was one move away from the gun in my pocket. He wrapped my fingers around his dick. The skin felt warm and silky and made me think of Edie. She’d said he had a velvet penis, but she’d also insisted she was from a place called Andromeda and told me cigarettes would make my pores swell. Who knew what to believe? But the minute I got my hand on Bobby Davis’s dick, all those nights we’d gone out looking for him made sense. It was incredible how smooth the skin felt, even as he got harder.
“Stroke me,” he whispered.
I tightened my grip around him, and he flinched. “Ow! Not like that!”
“Sorry.” I tried again, grabbing him a bit lighter this time and squeezing.
“No.” He put his hand on top of mine again. “Don’t grab it, stroke it … Have you ever done this before?”
I didn’t answer, I was too embarrassed. I’d gotten so carried away in touching him, I never imagined there was a wrong way to give a handjob. I hated that word: handjob. It sounded like changing oil. Smelly, wet, greasy, and totally mechanical. This stroking business, nobody had ever mentioned it.
“Damn, I gotta teach you everything,” he said, and slowly moved our hands over his dick in a pumping motion, stroking. After a little while we got a rhythm going and he let go, folding his hands back behind his head. I was flying solo. Up and down, up and down, up and down, as he moaned louder and the muscles in my upper arm strained, like I’d been lifting heavy furniture. I had to stop but stopping wasn’t cool, so I channeled all of my energy into my hand. He shouted, “Go!” and I pumped faster out there in the fog, feeling like we’d escaped to an enchanted forest, a place where his penis was a magic wand and my hand the tool of a wizard. He screamed the word go over and over, practically in a trance, and I felt good because I could do what Edie had done and also because I was learning something. A skill.
When he came it was what I’d imagined: warm, sticky, and wet. I fell back on the car next to him and wiped my hand on my thigh, slowly, so he wouldn’t notice. Guys seemed attached to their stuff.Almost immediately, he hopped into his jeans and headed toward his car. Just like that. No smiles, no kisses, no thanks very much. I stood against my car, sniffling from the chilly wet air. A couple of cars roared by, honking like mad. Someone, a woman’s voice, shouted, “Whooo! Mets rule the fuckin’ planet!” and she sounded so much like Edie my heart jumped thinking she’d followed us, wishing she cared that much. I felt wet and hollow and thought about lying down in the pine needles to sleep away the winter.
“Hey, Speck, I’m taking off!” Bobby shouted, above the roar of his Chevy.
“Wait!”
“What?”
“Can I follow you out?”
“I guess.”
I climbed inside my Saab and quickly turned the keys, my headlights spilling across the blacktop with its dotted white lines, the smoky trees and sheets of steel sky behind it. We were heading into a long, cold winter. Peeling out behind Bobby, I was again thankful for my foreign car with its safety seals, even though I’d already stunk it up with cigarettes and Coke spills and old french fries. I pushed in the lighter and flipped open my cigs, turned on the tape deck and Frank Zappa blared liked an alarm … a nasty little Jewish princess … with titanic tits and sand-blasted zits … I had the zits but not the tits—it wasn’t fair. And I was only half a Jew. Stuck between two stupid religions and not feeling either one of them. I was such a Gemini. So was John Strong. You really liked Geminis.
Zappa made me too thinky. I switched to the radio, searching for the final score. The lighter popped and I lit up with one hand, tailgating Bobby as we headed north on the Meadowbrook. My speedometer said ninety. Every so often I passed him, and then he’d speed up and pass me, and it was like we were playing a game, seeing who could go faster, until he pulled off at the exit for the racetrack, and I followed him through the off-ramp, a long, silent cavern. We drove a few minutes down a two-lane road flanked by charcoal trees, passing a few lively traffic lights, until we came to a well-lit intersection with a gas station and a 7-Eleven diagonally across from it. I turned into the parking lot behind Bobby and watched him jump out of his car. Girls followed guys all over the place because guys would never wait up.
I ejected Zappa from my tape deck and left my car, slipping the tape into my back pocket. Two guys were hanging out by an old station wagon near the front of the store. Someone hissed as I passed, and I wondered if they could tell I’d just given a handjob. Maybe there was something different about my walk, my face, the way I shoved my hands in my front pockets. I did feel sort of older and tougher with that gun in my pocket. I turned and hissed at them. They burst out laughing. “Come back and tawk t’us!” one of them shouted.
“My boyfriend’s inside,” I hollered over my shoulder, then walked inside 7-Eleven. I liked the way that sounded, my boyfriend. You said it all the time and I could see why. Those two little words said there was someone in the world who cared what happened to you, someone to care about. And have sex with. Must have made you feel pretty normal.
It was so bright inside I wished I had my sunglasses. Light streamed from the ceiling, beamed down on the aisles of reflective packaging, smothering everything in a multicolored shower. That much electricity has a drone to it. You could barely hear the cash register or Muzak. A few people moved through the light in slow motion, not black-and-white, but sepia-toned against the colored stacks. I couldn’t find Bobby anywhere.
Walking down an aisle with potato chips, pretzels, corn chips, soaps, dishwashing liquids, bug sprays, I came out at the coffee station. A bearded man in a sport jacket tipped tiny plastic cups of cream into a large Styrofoam container, glancing over his shoulder before adding each cup like he was casing the joint The kind of thing that happens in convenience stores. I rubbed my hands against my back pockets. Zappa in one, the gun in the other, I was ready for anything. “Hey, slugger,” the man said, and I froze. Jack used to call me that whenever I wore my pajamas that said “Slugger” on the front and had Tom Seaver’s number on the back.
“Hi, Daddy,” a wimpy little voice said, before the kid appeared. He was wearing a shiny blue baseball jacket and Mets cap. The hat was perfectly faded and bent on the left side of the visor, just like my old cap. Where did that kid get my cap?
“What do you have here?” Daddy lifted the king-sized chocolate bar in the kid’s hand. “Oh, no way, kiddo, that’s way too big. You’re mother’s already gonna kick my ass for having you out so late. Go and get a smaller one. How about a Chunky?”
“I hate Chunkys.”
“How can you hate Chunkys? They’ve got all those yummy raisins.”
“Raisins blow.”
The father chuckled, then looked around to see if anyone else had witnessed how cute his kid was, but I was the only one within earshot and I couldn’t care less about anything he said, all I wanted was my hat. The father turned back to the kid and told him to get whatever he wanted, but please, buddy, he said, just make it a little smaller, okay? The kid smiled and skipped down the candy aisle. I followed behind him, thinking I hadn’t seen my hat in years. At first I thought I’d left it in Scottsdale, but my grandmother couldn’t find it, and Nancy had given away tons of my stuff in the big move. I always knew it would turn up somewhere.
The kid put the giant candy bar back on the rack and started picking through the bars and bags. I moved closer behind him so I could grab the hat by the beanie. He kept choosing candy bars, turning and squeezing them, then putting them back. Who was going to want them after he’d battered them like that? Another time I might have alerted the manager. There were rules, you know? But I had a plan. I lowered my thumb and forefinger on the button in the center of the hat and lifted so slowly the kid had no idea. Every time he bent his head toward the chocolate bars I pulled the other way, until I inched the whole thing off his head. Couldn’t have been easier. I tucked the hat close to my stomach, took a few steps forward, and smacked into Bobby’s stomach.
“What are you doing?” he said, and wrestled the hat from me. The kid turned around and, seeing Bobby with the hat, reached up for the visor. “Hey, that’s mine!” he shouted. “Daaaaady!”
His father waddled up, a gargantuan cup of coffee in his hand. “What’s going on?”
“He stole my hat!”
“Hey, man, it fell off his head, I was just returning it,” Bobby said, handing the hat to the kid, and I felt so stupid. Like I needed him to protect me. I had a gun in my pocket. I could shoot up the whole place if I wanted to, and it was my hat. I used to wear it to games when I went with my father.
The kid returned the hat to his head, the father thanked Bobby, and they made their way toward the checkout counter. Bobby stared at me. I was hot as hell and my heart was whizzing like the microwave.
“It was my hat,” I said.
“You took it from that kid. I saw you.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Yeah, whatever, I don’t give a shit. You’re too fuckin’ … I thought maybe, but … you know, you shoulda hooked up with Noz when you had the chance, you’re as crazy as he is …” A series of tones sounded by the coffee station. “Shit … my burrito!” Bobby said, and jumped to the microwave. I followed him.
“What now?” he said, obviously annoyed when I was just doing what he’d said: following. He made a spitting noise between his teeth and grabbed his burrito by the edges of the plastic.
“I have your Zappa tape.”
“Keep it, okay. Keep it. Just get off my case.”
“But it was my hat. Come back to my house, I’ll show you pictures. We can get high … c’mon.”
“Are you deaf?” He stuck the forefinger of his free hand in my face, his burrito limp in the other like a thick plastic snake. “I said, get out of here. I’m sick of your face.”
“Okay, I’ll bring the photo album tomorrow. We can—”
“You are fucking pathetic.” He brushed past me.
“Why? What did I do? Bobby!”
He turned around and for a second I thought his lips were softening, but his eyes looked meaner than ever. “And if you even think about saying anything to Edie,” he said, “I’ll kill you.”
Then he walked to the cash register, and although I was tempted to follow—we were playing the boy-girl game, right?—I watched him pay for his burrito in the maddening white lights and disappear into the parking lot, thinking he was making a big mistake. Who else was going to buy him six-packs of tall boys and draw Zappa pictures for his dashboard? Give him handjobs along the side of the highway? Listen to his problems? I was the best thing that ever happened to him.
The next time I saw him I was wearing handcuffs, and he was completely shocked, he said. He couldn’t believe I’d actually used the gun.
BACK IN COURT AGAIN. Your mother barely cracks a tear she’s so poised, as if she’s gone way past crying to a much darker place. A holy place. She’s been giving interviews saying she prays every day for guidance and the courage to forgive. She has returned to the church and her faith is deep. She doesn’t question. Doesn’t condemn. She tells reporters you were an angel who mistakenly fell to earth as a human being. An angel who spread love all over the place but was really just burning to get back to heaven.
This blows my mind. I am many things, but not a martyr. The agent who helped you transcend the crystal boundaries of heaven and earth. I acted not out of conviction or philosophy, and on that sweltering day in July, I never set out to kill you. You were everything to me. God, or whoever’s out there, please listen: I would do anything to bring you back again. I’d kill myself in a second if I thought it would repay your family for the grief I’ve caused. If I could extract the pain from your father’s eyes. In the halfhearted light of the courtroom his face sags like globs of ashen clay. So does your mother’s, despite her tales of angels and long meditative breaths. I want to smack her.
You deserve better. A mother who shouts for justice. Like your fans outside the courthouse holding posters with the years 1965–1987 scrawled across your face. When the police vans roll up they start shouting. Words, some less true than others; words so monotonous they blend into each other: stalkerbitchdykemurdererwhore!
I keep my head down, even after the police officers steer me through the crowd and into the noisy courtroom. It’s weird, so many people here to see me and I don’t know most of them. I’m as famous as you were. But I would never want to be an actress. It’s too depressing.
Turns out my mother is the crier. From the moment the judge slaps his gavel, she wails. It is the first time I have ever seen her cry. She used to be a rock. Like me. A woman sitting next to her puts an arm around my mother’s shoulder. She is my mother’s sponsor. Jack sits in the row behind them, alone. Unshaven, his Italian suit rumpled as if he’s been wearing it for days, he rocks back and forth in his seat like an autistic kid. Where’s his sponsor? Helplessness pours from him, and it freaks me out. I wish he hadn’t come today. It’s just another bail hearing, my third since I’ve been at Rikers. The way I see it, Brickman has one more chance to get me out of here or he’s history.
The judge is a Chinese man with a round face and thick glasses he removes to look over my records. He reads silently. Heat steams from the pipes like a clamoring waterfall, making me sleepy.
All I do is sleep since the scene with Angel’s tattoo landed me in a new cell. Back on suicide watch, I’m monitored 24/7. I lost my job in the laundry and any chance of growing tomatoes. I have dreams of fiery red tomatoes. Dreams of waking up at dawn and working the fields. Someday I am going to live on a kibbutz. For now I eat hard mealy tomatoes in my cell, and every couple of days they take me to the showers, when nobody else is around. I miss talking to Angel, listening to warnings of the world outside, her world of ice-cold forties and salsa music and infected babies. The weird thing is, I bet Angel’s a good mother when she’s not too junked out of her head. I try not to remember her stoned, just as in the coldest hours, when death seems easier than living, I try not to long for Mimi. The way her hand doubled on top of mine when I first held the tattoo gun, just like Bobby’s hands on the old Smith & Wesson. It’s stupid the way people teach you things and then get so surprised when you actually go out and use what you’ve learned.
I slept through Christmas and New Year’s Eve. On January first they let me into the fishbowl. Barely anyone there, the orange chairs and vinyl couches felt oppressive. Streams of light from the window pricked my skin. Better to be in my cold, dark cell, with no reminders of what I’m missing. I made a collect call to my grandmother in the desert and asked her to tell me stories about her childhood. She said the ceilings in her apartment building were so thin she could hear the man upstairs boiling water for his bath every morning before the sun came up. Rats patrolled the hallways as if it was their space and these immigrant people with their pale skin and pushcarts had wormed their way in. The only toilet was at the end of a long hallway with a broken window above it. In the winter it was so cold my grandmother peed through her underpants instead of pulling them down past her thighs.
The worst, she said, was having to share the toilet with so many people. Their smells clung to the air like the flecks of feces hugging the white porcelain basin. “Where do you go to the bathroom?” she asked me.
“In my cell.”
“You have your own toilet?”
“Yes.”
“See, there’s always something to be thankful for.”
I had to hang up before I started hating myself. How did I do this to her? This gray-headed woman whose eyelids hung low with the weight of history, a woman who at the age of sixteen had to quit school even though the teacher said she was the brightest in the class and work ten hours a day packaging bottles in a factory to support her family. At night she came home to a smelly shared bathroom.
Now she lives with a man who sometimes can’t remember her name, but she won’t let them put him in a home. Just as she won’t abandon me. She makes long-distance calls to Rikers to see if they’re feeding me. She’s got the number programmed on her speed dial. The thought of her leafing her swollen knuckles through the instruction manual and learning how to connect to a jailhouse when she pushes my name makes me so sad I’m soggy. My internal organs, beginning with my banged-up heart, are dripping away. In a dream, I scoop up my grandmother, put my hands over her ears, and buzz like a test of the Emergency Broadcasting System, drowning out the noise, the persistent chorus tapping like an old-fashioned telegram: stalkerbitchdykemurdererwhore!
When the gavel falls a final time, I am ordered to return to my cell. Brickman has failed once again to prove their holding me without bail is cruel and unusual punishment for a firsttime offender whose indictment is clouded with circumstantial evidence. My behavior on the inside has not helped. All of the tattoos and stolen needles. Licking Angel’s tainted blood from my lips. If she has the virus, why shouldn’t I? One guard testified to confiscating my Walkman and Bic pens. It’s not worth going into any more of the proceedings, they do it better on the soaps. Know only that your mother breathes a sigh of relief as they escort me out of the courtroom.
A few days later the A.D.A. gives an interview. I am trying not to be insulted that they’ve passed my case down to an assistant, a plain-Jane type with an angular Picasso face who from what I can tell wears only gray. She is pleased the judge denied me bail and says it points to the seriousness of my crime. A heinous murder and the worst case of erotomania this city has seen since Mark David Chapman.
She’s found a word for loving too much and I am it.
I am an erotomaniac.
I like the sound of it.
The shrink tells me not to think too much about anything they say. She’s never heard of plain-Jane Picasso’s word and she’s been to grad school. It’s the American way to turn the things people do into diseases, she says. I think she was born somewhere else, this shrink, in Europe or Australia. Her accent reminds me of Clay Thompson from World, especially when she says the word darling. I stopped talking to her briefly last fall when Angel said it was a red flag, like tattooing the word sicko on my forehead.
But Angel is in the prison hospital and I am confined to my cell most of the day without anybody to talk to. Without you.
Perhaps I should be in a hospital as well. The love hospital. It has pink walls and heart-shaped hospital beds. Pretty nurses deliver meds in champagne glasses. At the love hospital there is no such thing as loving too much. Everyone is an erotomaniac.
I write the word with my felt-tip pen. No ballpoints for me anymore. They’re afraid I might use them to puncture my veins. My sentences look different in felt tip; they’re fuzzier, almost crying into the page. Calling out for you the way I can’t do otherwise. As hard as I try, I can’t make the tears come. At first I had to be tough. Now I am simply blank.
You don’t come to me in my new cell. The shrink says this is also normal, there’s a word for it, too, probably. Something that means you were never the person I thought you were, meaning I invented the whole thing, meaning … I keep remembering the gun and the hole in your chest with smoke coming out of it. It’s like it’s not real. Like I’m living in the endless middle of World Without End (soaps aren’t big on endings), but this is real life, where no plot on the planet can ever bring you back. No swindle or cover-up, no “Hah! It was my identical twin you killed!” Even on the show, they left few openings: You were run down by a drunk driver, and everyone in Foxboro mourned for months. It was good for the cast, producers said. A natural outlet for their grief. But it must have been awful watching those episodes knowing the ending was real. At least it gave fans a sense of finality. They could see you were really gone, in life and on television.
And this is the crazy part: I am still here.
Trapped in a world without end, without you.
ICE AND SNOW PILED UP ALL WINTER LONG. Jack tucked his wool slacks into waterproof boots before getting in his car and driving into the city. He’d had a special closet in his office built for his fancy shoes, although he barely touched ground from garage to garage. At home, he hung a bumper sticker on our refrigerator with a picture of a dog lifting his leg to pee. Underneath it said: Just Say No to Yellow Snow.
In February we took a ski trip to Vermont and ate piles of snow with maple syrup on top. Nancy got the flu and was bedridden half the week. I took a lesson every morning. In the afternoons, Jack and I skied black-diamond slopes. At night I watched the sky, first awash in stars, then as the week wore on a sheet of heavy gray clouds that finally dragged in the rain. A skier’s worst enemy. People forfeited their weekly tickets and called it quits or spent their final days of vacation driving into town, sipping hot chocolate, playing backgammon and Boggle and Parcheesi in the lodge. We went shopping for new equipment—the sales were fantastic—although Jack said it was the last time he would ski the East Coast; conditions were too unpredictable. I got a new pair of skies I never even tried. The storm had wiped out everything. I swear, you could hear the mountain cry.
One rainy morning, a man in a bright yellow raincoat with matching hat and boots knocked on our door and told Nancy her mother had just called the condo office, and my mother, looking perplexed, said, “I didn’t give her that number.”
“She says not to worry, but she needs to speak to you immediately. You can call from the office if you’d like.”
Nancy grabbed her ski jacket and pointy wool hat that made her look like a woodpecker and stepped quickly into her furry after-ski boots. Jack looked up from the counter and murmured, “Need me?” but she’d already shut the door behind her. He returned to whatever it was he was doing. I walked to the windows and looked out at the gray parking lot. The clouds hung so low you could barely see the mountain. My throat was dry. Back in the kitchenette, Jack sat at the counter.
“What do you think’s going on?” I asked, joining him.
“What am I, psychic?” He didn’t look up, wasn’t even interested. She wasn’t his mother.
I opened the refrigerator and grabbed a carton of orange juice. Drank straight from the container. Jack stared at me. I guess I wasn’t supposed to, but he did. It tasted better. “Hey,” he said, “did you know there’s a maple syrup farm near here? I wonder if it’s the season. There’s only a couple a weeks a year you can bleed the trees … You know what they do? They make a hole in the tree and then they tie a bucket underneath to catch the sap. It’s wild. I mean, I’d really love to see that. You know, here we are putting a man on the moon and we’re still catching maple syrup in metal buckets. Yeah, I’d really like to see that.”
“Me too.”
He raised his head. “You’re humoring the old man?”
“No, really.”
“Okay, then let’s see if the trees are drooling yet.” He hopped off his stool and walked toward the back of the condo, speaking over his shoulder. “And if they’re not, we’ll come back. We can come back, right? There’s nothing stopping us. This shitty little town might be all right in the spring …”
He disappeared behind the bathroom door. I sat down at the counter where he’d been sitting. The seat was still warm and felt good. Jack generated a lot of heat. When I was a kid and we used to sit together on my bed, it was always cozy when I got underneath the covers. He’d filled up my room with his body, his words, his maple-y smell. Now he couldn’t talk to me without doing a million other things.
Seeking a distraction of my own, I dug up the copy of Babbling ’Bout Brooke I had in my backpack. A new woman had taken over your fan club, and for weeks she’d been organizing a letter-writing campaign to an archbishop in the Midwest who had condemned a conflicted and heavily flashbacked kiss between Jaymie Jo and Father Brody. It was a disgrace, the bishop said, a total disparagement of the cloth. He was begging advertisers, in the name of decency, to pull their spots. But this new president of your fan club, a frosted blonde with fat cheeks and red blotches like Gorbachev’s on her neck and face, said it was just art imitating life and if the church couldn’t deal with having a mirror held up to it then that was its own problem. She was right, even though I hated her guts. The way she said everything was “hunky-Dorito”; her subservient moonbeam of a smile. You couldn’t have had anything in common with her.
Anyway, I didn’t care much about the church, those bishops were always railing against something, but I was pissed at the writers. They were totally out of touch with your character. Last fall you told Soap Opera Digest you’d stopped having sex with your boyfriend to get into Jaymie Jo’s head and this had given you strength you never knew you had. I could totally relate. After me and Bobby broke up I decided I was finished with sex. Any idiot could secrete a hormone. It was the opposite that took real work. This is what you’d learned, and now they wanted your Jaymie Jo to give it up because the priest was good-looking, when he wasn’t even half as cute as John Strong, and you’d managed to hold him off. Nobody was going to buy it.
I’d crafted these thoughts into a letter to you and cc’d the producers. A response came back, typewritten, so nobody would question it. You wrote (and I quote this from memory): Dear Lillian G. Speck, I am aware of the problems some people have interpreted in Jaymie Jo’s decision. We are working to resolve these very sensitive issues in a way that is satisfactory to everyone without compromising the integrity of the story or anybody’s character. I am very thankful for your letter. Without the loyal support of fans like you, the often groundbreaking work we’re doing on the show would be impossible. Always, Brooke.
You scribbled your signature with a prominent B, a sign of confidence and complicity, but the letter sounded nothing like you. I knew you were angry about Jaymie Jo’s decision, I could read between the lines, but I also knew you had to do what the producers said. In Babbling you said you would never intentionally offend the church, and once people saw where the story was going they’d understand. The message was really about “love on the macro scale.” And your new fan club president said if anyone knew about macro-love it was you, and I thought, What right did she have to talk about your love? This woman who looked like the leader of the Communists. Who loved her so damn much?
I tossed the newsletter and returned to the windows. Mountain still weeping, maples drowning in their tears, drooling. Did the rain help loosen their syrup glands the way my nose always ran in the cold?
Nancy returned, drenched and heavy. Looking at her gave me a chill. The toilet flushed behind the bathroom door and Jack stepped outside. Their eyes met for a quick second, a gray field beaming between them. My throat clamped. Shaking off her hat and coat, Nancy spoke calmly: “My father’s in the hospital. He ran the car into the divider and flipped over. He’s okay, miraculously. Just a few scratches. But he doesn’t remember any of it. He keeps asking why he took the bus to the mall when he has a car, why the driver wasn’t more careful. My mother says he’s worried about the other passengers, and every time she tells him there were no other passengers, he was driving, he nods, says, ‘Oh, that’s good,’ is quiet for a few seconds, then asks why he took the bus to the mall.”
“Okay, that’s it, the party’s over,” Jack said. “The car is history. I told you he shouldn’t be driving, he can barely see two feet in front of him on the shuffle board court. What is with motor vehicles out there? Aren’t they supposed to test you again when you hit a certain age?”
“This isn’t about his driving.”
“How many times has he run off the road? Huh? It’s always, ‘One more time and we’ll take the car away.’ Well, one more time has come.”
“He doesn’t remember any of it.”
“He’s too old, let me tell you—”
“Did you hear me? He doesn’t remember any of it!” Nancy shouted, and Jack and I both stared at her, so stiff. Like a mannequin. Rain pounded the glass doors, melting the clouds and trees and muddy roads outside. The wind was howling. Nancy walked to the kitchenette, took a glass from the drying rack, and turned on the sink, testing the water with her fingers before filling it. She drank two glasses of water in two long sips, then went for the gin. It wasn’t even noon. Jack said he was going out to find the paper, and I asked if I could go with him.
He didn’t answer, but I put on my ski jacket and hiking boots and followed him outside. We walked fast, although the rain letting up a bit felt good. Jack talked about the weather, how you don’t really notice it until it gets in your way. I noticed it all the time, especially the rain. At home I really liked the rain. Here, it turned this magical wonderland into a scalped mountain. Who’d thought of cutting into it like that? Out there in the rain it didn’t seem right.
Jack asked me if I’d met anyone in my lessons, and I shook my head no. “There were a bunch of kids in my class,” he said. “We probably got into the wrong groups.”
“There were kids in my group, I just didn’t talk to them. They were kind of pompous.”
“They were all much better than me. Don’t say anything. You’ll see when you’re my age, it’s not easy watching people who aren’t thinking, If I go too fast I could lose control and break something or wind up dead or paralyzed or worse. One guy literally jumped from mogul to mogul, it was really something.”
“A lot of people in my group did that.”
“It was like the kid was flying,” Jack smiled. We’d reached the general store and went inside.
Jack picked up his newspaper and asked if I wanted anything. I took a few root beer sticks from a glass jar on the counter, he paid, and we left the store. Jack was going over to the lodge to read. “I’ll see you back at home,” he said, and then must have sensed I wanted to go with him. “You know, one of the guys in my class mentioned a teen center … I think it’s in the old barn. Why don’t you try and find it? I bet there’s a lot of kids hanging out. I mean, what else is there to do now, right?”
“Nothing,” I said, and feeling the clamp around my neck, barely got out the words, “maybe I’ll go,” knowing I wouldn’t be caught near anything called a teen center. I broke apart from Jack and walked toward the base of the mountain. The chair lift was running without passengers. Every thirty seconds or so one chair disappeared into the clouds as another one emerged from the mist on the other side. I thought it would be cool if we could ride into the clouds together. I like it down here, you said. Let’s walk through the woods back to your house. I want to hear more about you.
No matter what was going on in your life, you always wanted to hear about me. This is exactly why I loved you. And did I have a lot on my mind. I’d been thinking about celibacy. About how sex really wasn’t such a big deal. It was one of those things like drinking beer, or root beer for that matter—anybody could do it. Like the song says, birds do it, bees do it, my parents do it … You didn’t have to be smart or funny or know anything about politics. In fact, you didn’t have to know anything at all. It was the lowest common denominator.
And another thing I loved about you was you understood this. Since the bishops had been accusing you of cursing the priesthood, you felt like you had to defend sex, but only when it was tied to love. You said the story line was about a love so strong that—even though it went against all of society—to deny it physically would have been wrong. You said it had nothing to do with sex as we commonly refer to it and I knew exactly what you meant. Sex was everywhere. You’d see it in guys and girls together, holding hands like little commercials for it. Like you’re nothing if you’re not having sex. I hate to say it, but you were like that with John Strong: Watching you guys together was like looking at sex. But I knew you wanted more.
In Babbling you said you were really depressed when you and John broke up. You really loved him, and even though all the tabloids said he was having an affair with the TV star Robyn Carlyle, you swore you never believed them. Publicly, you said you hoped the two of you could work out your difficulties and get back together. But I knew better. There was nothing between you but common everyday sex.
And the breakup was good for your career. Already you were reading through movie scripts and thinking about directing. You didn’t need John Strong eating up your time and mental energy. He didn’t deserve it.
We’d come to the end of the muddy path that led to the parking lot behind the condo. The drizzling had just about stopped, and it was much colder. If the temperature kept falling, they could maybe turn on the snow machines overnight and fill in some of the grassy patches. We could get in one last day of skiing. I wanted you to stay and ski with me tomorrow but you had to work. It wasn’t your fault, it went with the territory, and I was respectful, careful not to throw myself on you like the rest of your desperate fans.
As quickly as you’d come, you were gone. I stood alone in the half-empty lot, feeling as soggy as the barren mountain. People were leaving; they’d had enough. Through the glass doors of the condo, I could see Nancy curled up like a baby on the couch, the empty glass on the table in front of her, and I wished like hell I could have gotten out of there, too.
EACH DAY IS NO DIFFERENT FROM THE NEXT. I wake up to the sounds of the guard depositing my breakfast tray and walk over to the sink. Splash cold water on my face, try to see my reflection in the rusty pipes. Mirrors are taboo. Afraid I’ll break the glass and use the pieces to slice up my wrists, they won’t even let me keep the compact Nancy gave me.
You don’t realize how much you miss your face until you can’t see it—or maybe you do, Brooke. Is that what being dead is like? No concept of yourself other than your feelings. And nobody to share them with. You’re totally alone.
When you think about the word alone, what does it look like? A desert with sweeping sand dunes as far as the eye can see? The busiest of streets in the busiest of cities where faces pass at lightning speed and not one is familiar? Alone. Say it as if it were an article and a noun: I am a lone.
And what does it feel like, that word? Alone. Something like nausea, but it breaks the skin in tiny red bumps. Alone is a physical thing.
The water in my sink won’t get hot, and the soap barely lathers. It’s white with dirty brown grooves in the bar and reminds me of the soap in Edie’s bathroom. Her mom bought soap, paper towels, toilet paper, shampoo in bulk for discount prices, and everything seemed distilled, a lesser version of what it was supposed to be. Like Edie after Los Angeles.
Frantic for suds, I rub my fingers and palms over my face, trying to generate some sort of chemical reaction. Spontaneous combustion. If only I could blow myself up like a giant star. Incinerate the person I no longer see. What do I look like in here? What did I look like outside? When I was young I used to think people ignored me because I was so ugly. Jack and Nancy couldn’t get too close, fearing the disease might rub off on them. Kids teased me about the white streak in my hair. Whenever strangers looked too closely I assumed they’d never seen a child so disgusting.
You wouldn’t understand. Not unless you’ve ever wrapped your arms so tightly around your neck and shoulders just to know what it feels like to be held. Then you realize you’re hugging yourself and it’s more lonely than before. No, you couldn’t possibly understand what it’s like to be a lone. Not until you’ve spent your days and nights in an hourglass. One among thousands, millions, gazillions of granules of sand. Confined yet endless: This is what we mean when we speak of eternity.
Every day I get soap in my eyes, and every day it stings. At least I know my face is there. And you’re still lost to me. You’ve really disappeared this time. Left me to wonder whether it was actually you in the first place, or if they might be right: I never had a chance. But if you weren’t you, then how can I be me?
I drink a sip of bleach from the plastic cup the guard slipped onto my breakfast tray. My stomach contracts in rapid buckles. I am going to vomit, but I keep it down. At first I scoured my skin with bleach until it burned, trying to erase myself. It never worked. Sipping again from the cup, I can maybe spit up everything I’ve kept inside so long. I take out a yellow legal pad and draw a few squiggly lines, but can’t concentrate long enough to hold the pen.
There is an interview with your mother in a thick magazine—another gift from my favorite guard, the bleach-carrier. I open the pages to a shock of perfume and find the story I’ve read and re-read. Your mother says she’s happy you were happy in the months before your death. You’d stopped drinking and were thrilled to be onstage again. In such a demanding role, too. What your mother doesn’t know and what I’ve never told a soul is that I smelled the suede flask next to you the day I found you in the stairwell. I knew the truth.
I run my forefinger along the pictures of you. In one you’re surrounded by a group of fans at a mall somewhere in America. So accessible, so late in the game. After the haircut, the broken arm, the NAACP benefit where you kept calling it the ASPCA and had to be escorted offstage. The next day you issued an apology, saying your new allergy medication had made you hallucinate. And we bought it, all of us who devoured every issue of Babbling ’Bout Brooke and believed you when you said you needed three different pills just so you could breathe. At night I held you in my arms and promised everything would be okay.
But your mother says she knew better. She wanted you to take a break from World. Only there you were a few months later on the set they’d created in New York, an action shot, the camera and director visible—who cares? That wasn’t the real you. Then you’re stepping out of a limo with John Strong, posing at a premiere like you had everything anybody ever wanted: fame, fortune, romance. And you liked your family. Turning the page, I find you sitting on a couch with your sister and that damn happy dog, your father in a chair next to you reading the paper and mother hovering behind him, and it’s this one that gets me. The everydayness of it. Like whoever took the shot only had to wait a couple of seconds for you to fall into place: a family.
It hurts so bad I have to cover you with my finger. And still they smile, the dog’s tongue like a piece of ham, and I know I can’t take you from them, even though you’re gone. It’s you I’ve robbed of everything.
Look at me. Listen closely.
I am what it looks like, feels like, this word alone.