A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That Read online

  “Fuck,” I say.

  He gently nudges my thigh.

  “No,” I tell him.

  “It’s easy,” he says.

  “I’m not climbing out that window,” I say stubbornly.

  “Come on,” he says.

  “I can’t, I don’t…”

  “I’m sorry—about the door, I mean. I wish it worked.”

  “So do I.”

  “When it’s just me—I climb in, I climb out—sometimes I use the window without even checking the damn door. You can do it.”

  “Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do.” I am crying now and shaking my head.

  “It’s okay.”

  “It’s not. It’s too damn much.”

  “I won’t look,” he says. “I’ll face the building across the street. Pretend that you’re alone,” he says.

  “I am alone,” I say.

  “I’ll cover my eyes. See?” he says through open fingers.

  I make him turn around. I make him promise. I make him keep his hands in front of his face, those fingers closed, and then I take a deep breath and hoist my leg, one black boot, then the other, moving my hips and torso and shoulders and head out of the car window and into the night, making my way back to her.

  A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That

  1.

  It was a Saturday morning in early December, and I was deciding exactly what it was that I wanted. I wanted my mother healthy and I wanted a husband or at least a boyfriend or at least a dinner date for Friday night. Right now, though, I was in bed with one more man I barely knew. He was sleeping and I was wondering how to get out of bed without waking him. The two of us were on our sides, his soft crotch up against my back. I faced the wall. His arms were wrapped around my body, his fingers intertwined, locked under my breasts. It felt good and suffocating at once, the position I was in, and I thought that if this man were my husband he would know when I wanted him like this, bundled around me, and when I didn’t. But he wasn’t and he didn’t.

  I was gently picking Rex’s fingers apart while making a list in my head, resolutions aimed at changing things. I wasn’t waiting for New Year’s Day this time because it never worked for me. I knew it wasn’t always enough, just deciding what I wanted; there were necessary steps. And even then, if I took those steps—if I slept only with men who knew my full name, if I signed up for dance classes, if I ate more fruit—even then there was no guarantee I’d get what I wanted, or if I got it, that it would be what I really wanted after all. Also, there were things I could control and things I couldn’t. Say, if I was approachable, dressed in denim, tennis shoes, a smile on my face, I might be approached. Then there was my mother’s health that I couldn’t control, and it didn’t matter if I screamed and sobbed and shook in my sheets all night long, if I ran my fingernails across my bare thighs, drawing blood, or if I behaved like other people who loved their mothers, yes, but had healthier perspectives, ones that enabled them to get on with things. What I wanted didn’t decide anything: cancer disappeared or came back on its own.

  I was thinking that with a husband or boyfriend or date for Friday night I would have someone to soothe me when she died. Who knows, if I had a husband, I might turn from him with a scowl on my face. Everything he said and did not say in response to my mother’s dying might be all wrong. He might run off with Mark and Billy and Darrin to get a beer because my sorrow was too great and ugly, filling every room and cup in the house. He might sit across the table from me, shrug his shoulders and say nothing. He might tear the bread without imagining its effect on my heart. He might try, “She’s in a better place, Rachel,” or “She’s with Jesus,” or worse: “God’s got a special plan for her.” And I might hate him suddenly, asking, “Yeah, what’s that? What sort of plan does God have?” And when he mumbled something else, I might wish him dead instead of her. I might barter in my head with that God I don’t believe in for my mother’s life back: Take this from me, take that, take my mumbling, bread-tearing idiot and my adjunct jobs, but please let me have her sitting in her blue chair, sewing, let me have her standing in the hall, modeling one of her handmade dresses.

  But now, I was prying at Rex’s fingers, convinced that a husband might make the unbearable a little less so.

  Depending on what magazine I opened or what relative I talked to, there were specific things a woman needed to do to deserve a husband: lose weight, balance cucumber slices over her eyes for an hour a day, smile, don’t smile too much, keep the number of former lovers she’s had to herself, learn to cook a perfect brisket, pretend she’s sweeter than she is, less educated, more educated, younger, taller, learn to drive a stick shift, talk during sex, scream during sex, shut up during sex, take him into her mouth because he’ll love it, don’t take him into her mouth because it’s a whorish act, listen and nod, listen and nod, and above all, stop cussing.

  “Fuck,” I said softly, just now breaking Rex’s hands apart and getting free. I turned and looked at him. It was still early, and the sun was coming in a bit at a time, lighting the sheets and half of his face. One half was mashed into the pillow, but the half I could see looked fine, full lips and long girlie eyelashes. Still, he wasn’t my future. The reasons were numerous: he lived on another continent, outside London, he had a violent ex-wife, a new girlfriend, there was his baby boy and teenage girl, but mostly, I slept with him after two days, two brief meetings, which was one thing magazines and my relatives agreed on: you shouldn’t offer up the dressing unless he buys the salad.

  I was still a little drunk from last night’s cider and feared my heart was somehow visible, puffed up, obvious and eager inside my chest.

  “Coffee?” I said, waking him.

  “Yes,” he said, groggily. “Is your mum still here?”

  “No,” I told him.

  “Where’d she go? I was hoping to meet her,” he said, winking.

  “She buys ointment on Saturday mornings.”

  “For what?”

  “The radiation burns her skin.”

  He frowned.

  “Monday they did her shoulder. It’ll just now begin to crack,” I said, unable to stop myself.

  “Christ,” he said. “Jesus,” he said.

  I stepped out of bed and pulled the sheet with me. I turned at the door, knotting the sheet at my chest. His dick was curled and humble on his thigh.

  “Your room is chilly,” he said, yanking the blanket up and around his body. He shivered or pretended to.

  “What did you expect?”

  “I thought Los Angeles would be warm. Isn’t it always warm? Isn’t that what you people like best?”

  “We’re at the beach, remember? It’s not always warm.”

  He smiled. “Did you mention coffee?”

  “Right away,” I told him, opening the bedroom door, thinking that I must look like a ghost, wrapped in white, moving down the hall, away from him.

  The kitchen tile was cold, sticky in spots where last night we spilled nightcaps. I understood it was playing house, all of it, fixing drinks, leaving him in a bedroom I called mine, this couple stuff, this dressing in sheets. I was on tiptoe at the cupboard, reaching for cups, sugar cubes, imagining him. Perhaps he turned and stirred now in a bed I didn’t even own. Perhaps he was stretching to the window, parting the blinds, looking at the sea.

  Last night I stifled my sobs into the pillow. I was either grieving or coming lately, the sounds themselves blending into one strange cry. Sometimes I didn’t know the difference, how to identify or name my very own bells. I wondered if my mother heard me from her own bedroom, sleeping or trying to, perhaps being jolted awake by the noises I made at night.

  Six months earlier I had met this guy at a bar downtown who couldn’t have been over twenty. I remembered insisting on his ID before I let him touch my face with his fingers. I was sitting in a booth alone, and he slid up like a snake or cowboy, boots on, smelling like tobacco and mint and musk, a Southern accent—something I thought I hated—but when he said
, Hey girl, hey sad girl, my knees pulled apart from each other and I began talking myself into him.

  He was nervous or drunk, babbling, questions and comments coming at me like bullets: Let’s go. You live around here? I’m from Alabama. Where you from? I got me a horse at home. I ride. You ride? How old are you anyway? You married, engaged, got a boyfriend? Mind if I chew? I shook my head and he rolled his fat tongue in his mouth, then flipped the dark wad onto a cocktail napkin he held in his palm. “It’s mint flavored,” he told me. “At first I did cherry, now I do mint. Pretty soon I won’t need flavors at all.”

  “Great,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You’re advancing,” I said, smiling.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  On the way out the door I stopped him, my hand around his upper arm like a mother’s. “Let’s be quiet,” I said. “Let’s not make a mess.”

  He didn’t understand. He was just a boy. “A mess?” he said. “We’re not even in bed yet.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Fine,” I told the boy.

  Sometimes I’d meet a guy and bring him to the beach in front of my mother’s apartment building rather than go to his home or risk waking her. I imagined the stretch of sand was mine, and I’d kiss whoever he was, as if I owned it, as if it was where the two of us belonged, outside with the chill and broken bottles, with the cigarette butts and seaweed, the tiny bits of shells, outside, ten stories away from my life. But this one I brought into my mother’s home, up the elevator and down the hall, and I knew he was important that way, that after him, there’d be others.

  I don’t remember the elevator itself, but I must have been in there with him, four walls, mirrors, harsh light, the terrible sounds it made then, struggling up to the tenth floor. Perhaps he said, “Your elevator needs fixing,” or maybe he just sighed. Perhaps he couldn’t look at me. Perhaps his palms were on my hips and he stared hard into my eyes. Maybe I wanted to do it right there and he had to convince me to wait. Perhaps I wanted to be standing up, stuck between floors like bad luck or an accident. Perhaps he said, “Hey girl, hey sad girl, I need a bed to get this right.”

  I do remember laughing in the living room, my sandals hanging from two curled fingers. Then I was leading the way. He kissed me while I led, his lips cemented to my own. We were two sick twins, connected at the mouth like that, drunk in my mother’s apartment at two in the morning. My back was against my bedroom door and he was slipping a palm into my skirt when I heard my mother’s voice. “Rachel, what are you doing? Who’s with you?” she wanted to know. And her voice was deep, masculine, guttural, thick with sleep and chemo, worry or anger, and he said, “Hey, come on, I didn’t know you were married, you didn’t tell me you were married, I asked you at the bar and you didn’t say a thing.”

  I laughed, his thinking my mother was a man, my husband. I opened my mouth to set him straight, to tell him the voice was my mother’s and that my mother was sick, but what came out was, “He’s not my husband. He’s just a friend.”

  He was shaking his head, voicing his reluctance. “I don’t know” he said. “I don’t like this. Are you a liar?” he asked.

  I rolled my eyes. “Come on,” I said.

  “Are you a liar?” he repeated. “Maybe you’re a freak, one of those girls who brings a guy home just to make her husband jealous. I’ve heard about girls like you. Things get rough at home, you don’t like the way he looked at you over dinner or something, and you head to the neighborhood bar to bring back the competition—is that what I am, the competition?” He was pointing at his chest now, backing away.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I said.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I wouldn’t bring you here if I was married.”

  “I’m not so sure,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t need you,” I said softly, almost to myself.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “You chicks get weird. Who knows how weird you could get.”

  “That might be true, about being weird,” I said. “You might have a very good point there,” I told him.

  I left my mother’s competition in the hall and went to wash my face. When I returned, he was gone, vanished. It was as if he flew away, and I remember imagining him doing just that, growing wings and flying off. The front door was open, cool air from the building’s hallway filling the living room. It was the middle of the night and I was drunk still, my panties damp with wanting, my mouth still buzzing from his minty tobacco.

  In the morning, about the flying guy, my mother tried to stay quiet. Outside on the balcony, she was sitting in a plastic chair, wearing a floral robe and a pink scarf on her head. A wig sat in her lap, the morning paper spread out on top of the wig, red hairs fanning out behind the news. I was pacing the living room, hung over, sweaty and shy and guilty. I was looking at my mother. Every now and then she glanced up at me and smiled.

  “What?” I finally said.

  “You’re a grown-up,” she said.

  “And?”

  “I was just thinking about nature and what you need.”

  “Don’t start,” I said.

  “Still,” she said, “you need—”

  I cut her off. “It won’t happen again,” I lied.

  “You’re thirty. Of course you need connection.”

  “Please,” I said. “It’s too early for this. I’m going to make eggs now. Do you want a couple fried eggs?” I asked my mother.

  She lifted the newspaper from her lap and shook it out, pretending to read.

  I tried again. “Are you hungry?”

  My mother shook her head. She folded the newspaper up and rested it on her swollen belly. “I was young once,” she said. “I was healthy. Remember when I used to visit you in that apartment on Belmont Street?”

  “They weren’t really visits,” I said.

  “I visited you,” she insisted. “I came by every Friday.”

  “You came by, yes.”

  “That’s not a visit? What’s a visit?”

  “You wouldn’t put your purse down,” I said. “You walked from room to room and the damn thing swung from your shoulder”

  “I had things to do, people to see.”

  “That boyfriend in Anaheim.”

  “That’s right,” she said, smiling, obviously reminiscing. “The podiatrist who loved Disneyland—talked about specific rides the way other people talk about movies or books. ‘The Pirates of the Caribbean, now that’s a ride,’” she said.

  “You saw a lot of the park that summer.”

  “I did.”

  “You complained that it was all he talked about.”

  “Russell talked about feet, too. Thought mine were especially healthy, not a bunion or corn anywhere, no dry skin, clear nails. He was very happy with my feet,” she said.

  “I’m hungry. I’m going to cook something,” I said, but instead of turning around, I stood there, looking at her.

  My mother picked up the wig. She spun the wig on two fingers. “Remember those toys that spun around?”

  “Tops,” I said.

  “You liked the wooden ones. If I brought home plastic, you’d scream. You were picky. You were so very picky,” she said.

  And the word “picky” stayed with me even after I turned away from her and went to the kitchen. I was standing at the stove, watching the eggs bubble in the frying pan. I was thinking that a picky child does not necessarily grow into a picky adolescent, does not necessarily become a picky adult. She might move from boy to boy, from dark backseat to dark bar, from drowsy man to drowsy man. “Picky,” I said softly, deciding I’d write a poem later about last night’s mess, about the flying boy and his minty chew. I picked up the saltshaker and tipped it this way and that, watching the grains fall through the air.

  I was over thirty years old, living with my mother because she was sick and because I was poor. It was an exchange. It was love, yes, but need was a part of it too. I wanted to pretend I was still an
adult, that returning to my mother wasn’t an indication I’d gone backwards: thumb sucking, dependency, crawling, fear, and breast milk.

  Later, while I showered, my mother stood at the bathroom sink, pulling an extra toothbrush from a shopping bag. She punctured the package with a fingernail and tossed the wrapper into the trash. She slipped the toothbrush into the ceramic holder shaped like a hand. I could see my mother through the clear curtain, giving the brush a slot. “For guests,” she shouted. “In case a good one stays.”

  Her comment startled me and I nicked my calf. I slammed the razor down on the edge of the tub and looked out at her from behind the shower curtain. “Mom,” I said, in the same exasperated tone I’d used on her as a teenager. “Get out of here.”

  My calf bled and bled. The cut was tiny, but deep. I propped my foot up on the closed toilet and stopped the bleeding with tissue and pressure. I placed a Band-Aid on the cut, wrapped a towel around myself, and sat down on the edge of the tub, staring at the new toothbrush. My mother had placed it in the thumb slot, while our own brushes occupied the pinkie and ring finger. It was blue, a boy’s color, big and clean, with uneven bristles, better quality, more expensive, I could tell, than either of ours. I ran my finger over the bristles and thought about that flying guy and his fake ID, pretending.

  I have a problem with my imagination. I might be doing something with someone and I’ll be nodding or moving my torso or handing him a beer, but inside my head I am with someone else, doing something else entirely. Like skiing or surfing (which I’ve never been able to do) or bathing in a claw-foot tub with that husband I don’t have. From far away, the husband is unique, an individual, but when I come in close to focus on his features, they are indistinct; he is anyone.

  Sometimes I’ll be with the person I am with, but I’ll have scooted the two of us ahead in time so that we are better, tighter friends than we actually are, or longtime lovers, or maybe even on our way down the aisle, although it isn’t an ordinary aisle, with sisters and mothers weeping to the left and right, and little girls dressed like grown women with glossy lips and elaborate hair, but an empty room that isn’t a church, and my dress is black and tight and low-cut, and my legs are three inches longer than they really are.