A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That Page 5

  He looked at me closely, examined my hair and nails. He pulled on his chin, then refilled my glass. “Paint is paint,” he said.

  I stuck the creamy end of one of Angela’s birthday candles into my mouth. It was sweet, horribly so. I pulled the candle from my lips, providing proof, a ring of my own dark shade on the waxy stick. “See,” I said, “wrong color.”

  Later, in bed, he was calling me Rapel. Each time I corrected him, his pronunciation got worse. “That’s like repellent,” I said, “when two things, when two people, oh never mind,” I said. “My name is Rachel,” I told him, still drunk, thinking that maybe I was repellent or he was or we both were. I wanted to be a different woman, a woman who made better choices, and yet there I was on his bed, slipping off my shoes.

  “Rapel,” he repeated, pulling at my skirt.

  I twisted around, faced him. “Listen, it’s Rachel.” I said my name slowly, deliberately, three damn times. I isolated the sounds in the middle of my name and looked at him, making those sounds again and again, because suddenly, sitting in his dusty, closet-sized studio, my skirt half on and half off, my blouse in a silk pile at my bare feet, one bra strap over my shoulder, it was terribly important that he pronounce my name correctly.

  “Rasel ,” he tried.

  “No.” I pulled the bra strap up and tightened it. It snapped against my shoulder and made a sound.

  “Rapel,” he said for the last time, his face in my hair, and he said it firmly, definitively, in a tone that suggested that he was correcting me.

  “It’s my name. I know what my name is,” I told him, giving up.

  He wore all silk: black silk pants, a red silk shirt, even a silk band holding his hair back in a ponytail. It made me uncomfortable, all that silk on a man. He left the shirt on while we kissed, and I tried to hold onto his back, then shoulder, but the shirt slipped from between my fingers. His black hair spilled out, rested on the red collar.

  When I went to unbutton the shirt, he pulled his chest away. “Hair doesn’t bother me,” I said. “Don’t be shy,” I told him, letting my hand fall from the bed, reaching into my purse. “Hairy or smooth, it’s all the same to me.” I handed him the condom then, and he shook his head.

  “No,” he said, grimacing.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t like costumes.”

  “Costumes?”

  “I won’t cover it up.”

  I closed my legs like a pair of scissors. “Forget it, then.”

  He positioned himself on top of me, still in that gory shirt, and pushed my breasts together like an accordion. He propped his long, oddly thin, uncircumcised penis between them. I’d been with other uncircumcised men before, but Johnny had more foreskin than I’d ever seen. His penis looked like a skinny man with a hat on, all that extra skin like a stocking cap, I thought—a bony boy bundled up as if he was heading into the snow.

  Johnny was mesmerized, no longer interested in my thighs or neck but with my breasts alone, as if the two of them were detached from my body, something separate, as if they weren’t quite mine and I wasn’t quite me—the me he’d grown tired of already, the me who insisted on costumes, the me who twiddled her thumbs, the me who didn’t know her own damn name.

  He moved and moved, grunting, making friction, that hooded penis burning my skin. He went on and on, full of stamina and liquor, determined as he had been earlier about words, communication. It seemed it would never end. It seemed I would spend the rest of my life in just that position. He talked to me in low tones, in a language I didn’t recognize. The act didn’t make sense, and while he moved and groaned, I remember thinking: Do you know you re not inside anyone?

  I read somewhere that when a man comes he gives up only one teaspoon of semen. With Rex I thought of sugar, the amount I dropped in a cup of tea. I wondered if my perception was off, or maybe, because it had been so long since I allowed it, my memories about quantity were skewed, or maybe the article I remembered reading was wrong.

  Whatever it was, it seemed to me that Rex had come and come and come, wouldn’t stop coming, kissed my ears and cheek, filling me up with cups and cups of himself. I wondered how he could have kept so much of anything inside him. Afterwards, I wondered how he could move and toss and breathe like he was fine, not suddenly missing something.

  Immediately, I wanted him to leave—not because I didn’t like him, but because I did. And it was inevitable, his leaving. I wanted it over with now, the ridiculous kiss good-bye, the stiff wave, the back of his denim jacket. I was stuffed, my insides hot and full, and thought I might explode, right there, in my sheets, with a man I might have known if I’d had time, a chance, and since I didn’t have either, I wished he’d just vanish. “Shit,” I said. “What did we do?”

  “What did we do?” He touched my shoulder, pulled me to him, so that my back rested against his chest. “I’ll tell you what we did,” he whispered.

  His breath was hot on my neck. I wished he lived here.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I remember,” I told him.

  In the morning, we sat on the balcony, drinking coffee, looking out at the patio below, where handymen were setting up lounge chairs and tables, two guys in the corner putting together a gas grill. “I witnessed a suicide a few years ago,” I said. “I was sitting right here and a girl fell from the sky.”

  Rex shuddered. “You saw her hit the ground?”

  I nodded.

  “Poor you,” he said.

  “Poor her” I said.

  He put the cup down on the table, leaned forward, and reached for the sheet still wrapped around my body. I shook his hand away and we were quiet for several minutes. Finally, I asked about his farm. He told me about his favorite cows, how every one of them had a name: Bess and Bob and Tina and Janet, Buddy and Sid and Sally. He described their pretty spots, touching his own torso like a map. Here and here and here, he said. He wanted me to see. Cows weren’t dumb. It was a myth, a lie, something said to make butchers feel better. Anyone that raised cows knew they weren’t dumb. I would love them, he was sure, Buddy and Sid, their antics. Those two would change my mind about animals. I’d love his farm, his baby boy, the black sky that framed his home. I’d even love her, his new girlfriend. She was a redhead, did he tell me that earlier? I was nodding, pretending to listen, but thinking about my mother.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on.”

  I leaned closer to him and touched his arm.

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “You,” I said, smiling. But really, I wasn’t thinking about him at all. I had said my good-byes to him inside my head and was now thinking about my mother, how she often headed to Fabric King after a trip to the drugstore, how she was probably standing there now, touching assorted fabrics, deciding.

  After the mastectomy, as soon as her arm was working again, my mother started making dresses. Without a machine, without a pattern—by hand. She went to the fabric store once a week at least, and bought yards and yards of various prints. And black, she brought back plenty of black for me.

  The only thing my mom had to do was take a good, long look at my friends’ asses and she knew exactly what sizes they were. She said, “Honey, both of your best friends are small, but their asses aren’t. The three of you are shapely,” she told me. And then she laid the fabric over her bed and cut a dress out in the shape of one of them. “It’s healthy,” she told me, “your shapely asses.” She said their names out loud: Angela and Claire. “You’ll never be alone,” she said.

  She sat either in the chair by the window or on the couch, with or without a wig, and opened the sewing box. Then she sewed. She watched Jeopardy, then Seinfeld, and kept sewing.

  She didn’t do buttons or zippers, so she was limited in style and fabric texture. “It has to be durable, flexible,” she explained, pulling the needle from her mouth. “The body is in charge,” she told me.

  Last weekend I opened my mother’s cl
oset, and there wasn’t one store-bought piece of clothing. She’d given it all away. The closet was full, hundreds of her dresses hanging up—stripes and plaids and dots and flowers, summer pastels and earth tones, winter greens and dark browns.

  On Sunday my mother stood in the hallway, pulling a bright red number over her bald head, working the stretchy fabric over her shoulders. And she was beautiful, at the edge of everything, standing on that cliff in our hallway, working the vivid dress over her still-sexy thighs.

  I wanted to tell Rex about my mother’s thighs, about where she was now, Fabric King, but more than that, I wanted to be sitting at the table with a man who knew me well enough to understand all of it. I wanted to tell him, but I was looking at his face and hands, and his hands were reaching for a second time between my legs, and the sheet was falling, and I didn’t think he wanted to hear anything like that just then.

  5.

  At night in bed, I listened for her. I fought sleep, waiting until my mother’s breathing was audible before I let myself fall.

  I went backwards in time, remembering when my mother was healthy, busy with men of her own, busy with travel and plans. I’d just moved into my apartment on Belmont Street, and the bookshelves were built-in and the ceilings were high. My mother was in her late forties, with a new boyfriend, new hair color, and a fancy pair of sandals. It was 1990, and she was standing in my living room but couldn’t stay long. She refused to put down her purse, a black leather bag that swung from her hip with each turn. She moved down the hall. She moved into this room, into that room, into the tiny kitchen that smelled of ammonia and flowers, and finally into the bedroom, where I wouldn’t love any one of them, where the mattress, still in plastic, leaned like a crutch against the wall.

  My mother was a woman who couldn’t stay long, but she knew how to love a man. “I can’t stay long. Did I tell you that?”

  I nodded.

  “Look, new shoes, did I show you my new shoes?”

  “Nice,” I said.

  “Russell loves my feet. Do you like Russell?”

  “He’s fine, Mom.”

  “Do you think Russell is good for me?”

  I couldn’t tell the truth about anything, and it would take me months to unpack. There would be skirts and sweaters and dishes that I’d ignore, and there would be men and boys piling like dust into the corners of that new apartment, and then later, much later, there would be her lump and denial, and more denial, and then finally a diagnosis.

  I wanted every minute with my busy mother, a woman who couldn’t sit still with me. She wasn’t looking at my built-in bookcases or high ceilings, couldn’t focus on anything but the man who would soon be waiting for her at Disneyland. Dr. Russell Bell would be standing in front of the Haunted Mansion and had promised her a horse-drawn streetcar ride. Did I think he’d like her sandals? she wanted to know, pointing one pretty foot my way.

  Sometimes I skipped ahead and my mother was gone. I was living alone in her apartment. I was on the couch with a glass of wine, telling some man without a face all about her. He was bored, reaching for his gin and tonic. He scratched his arm. He nodded. Sorry, he said, unconvincingly. A dozen wigs? he said. Handmade dresses? No pattern? You’re kidding me, right? He put his drink on the coffee table, a hand on my thigh. Didn’t know cancer could wrap around a person’s heart—you making this shit up? he wanted to know.

  In bed I thought about the men who’d passed through me. I thought about the most recent one first, and then tried to remember the others. I tried to see their faces, their skin and teeth, but it was impossible, their features blurring into something vague. They became what they did for a living: artist, pizza man, teacher, baseball player.

  Just before sleep, that moment when I wasn’t sure what was real and what wasn’t, they became their uniforms or props, suspended in the air above my head, twirling around like a baby’s mobile: brush and oil paints, a chef’s hat, a bat and mitt, an eraser.

  Sometimes I imagined my own breasts were lost and I was searching for them. I knew them then for what they were: sneaky, independent, two pale liars.

  People told me that when a loved one dies, he or she is never forgotten. Other people said that forgetting what a dead person’s face looked like was part of the healing process. Some said that my life would never be the same, while others insisted that eventually, after a thousand cups of coffee and days at work, I would wake up one morning and not feel pulled into the carpet.

  It was one A.M. when I got up out of bed and went to her room. I looked at my mother, her nose and lips. Her face was shaped like a perfect heart. I watched her body fall and rise. I listened. I leaned down and touched her skull, the fuzz there like a boy’s new chin.

  “Is he here again?” she asked, her eyes still closed.

  “Who?”

  “The man you were with last week.”

  “No,” I told her.

  “Rex, right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Rex,” she repeated. “Where is he?”

  “He’s gone.”

  “He can stay here,” she mumbled, “if you like him.”

  “I like him.”

  “Where is he?” she said again.

  “He’s on a farm now, with a redhead.”

  “Farms are dirty,” she told me. “You don’t want to be on a farm, honey.” My mother turned on her side then, away from me, so that I no longer saw her face. She pulled the blanket around her body, up and over her head so that I saw none of her, not the smallest piece of flesh.

  Ella Bloom

  1999-2000

  The Clinic That Ella Built

  1.

  This was where Ella talked to the girls who came to her, itching and burning and foul. This was where they stood, thirteen and pregnant, twelve and misinformed, thirty and oh so sorry.

  She was a hand attached to a clipboard coming at Georgia Carter from inside a tiny window. Ella was nails and cuticles, knuckles and a white gold wedding band. This was where Georgia signed her name on a dotted line, so quickly that the signature could have been anyone’s. From behind the glass Ella looked at the girl’s messy, flippant cursive and shook her head.

  “What?” Georgia said, sliding the clipboard Ella’s way. There was a pen connected to it on a chain and a sticky note she’d placed on the paper. “Something wrong?” Georgia wanted to know.

  The note said: Make sure it’s you, Ella. You know what I mean.

  Ella knew what she meant. She meant she would not answer questions for the others. It meant it better be Ella inquiring, sitting on the stool across from her, or Georgia was out of there.

  Ella put the note into the pocket of her white jacket and slid the window closed. She nodded yes to Georgia’s request, but still the girl stood there looking at the window and at Ella’s face behind it as if she wanted more, as if Ella had something else to give her. Georgia’s expression was one of expectation and disappointment, and on the days she visited, Ella couldn’t help wondering about the girl’s life, about what went on when she was somewhere else. Finally, Georgia was shrugging and turning her back, walking toward the plastic couches and coffee tables, the magazines and mute TVs.

  Georgia was famous at the clinic, returning month after month with various problems. Syphilis in February, condyloma in April, and then, in August, the first of three unwanted pregnancies. The first one was immaculate, she explained. “I haven’t been with a boy in months,” she said, straight-faced, looking right at Ella.

  “Then it’s a miracle,” Ella said.

  “It is,” she said, adamant, her voice rising.

  “Hasn’t happened since Mary,” Ella continued.

  “Mary?”

  “The Virgin.”

  Georgia shrugged.

  “A miracle,” Ella repeated.

  “You wouldn’t know a miracle if it kicked your ass.”

  “You’ve got that saying wrong.”

  “So what?”

  “It’s ‘bit you in th
e ass,’ Georgia. You wouldn’t know a miracle if it bit you in the ass.”

  “Whatever,” she said.

  This was the stool where Georgia sat and squirmed, where she smacked her minty gum, where she sighed and swore and rolled her eyes. This was the cubicle where Ella leaned in and asked Georgia questions about boys, about precaution, about recklessness and sandals, about movies, instinct, and regret. This was where Ella leaned back and took notes. This was where she tapped her pen on her knee and stared right back at the girl.

  And here in the front of the clinic was where Ella’s husband of six months waited for her to finish up. These were the afternoons when Jack’s research for the day was complete, when his boss sent him away from the laboratory. “Go,” his boss said, “you’ve just gotten married.”

  Jack was a scientist who studied bats: the Fruit, Long-tongued, and Ghost-faced. He spent mornings just inches from their hairy faces, pinning their leathery wings to corkboards. He attached tiny clips to their eyes to keep them open. “That’s gruesome,” Ella told him. “They’re dead,” he reminded her.

  Ella believed that while Jack sat on the couch in the clinic waiting room, flipping through the magazines he settled for—People and Glamour, Modern Teen and Bride—the bats were still on his mind.

  This was Ella’s coworker, Sarah, who was good with numbers, who was tall and lean and busty, who walked with a swish. This was where she stood at closing: behind the counter, just feet from Ella’s husband. This was the adding machine on a low table in front of her, perfectly level with her crotch. And this was Sarah punching those numbers with manicured nails, tallying those numbers, while Ella, a matriculating English major with a disdain for math, stood in the back of the clinic, her designated space, in yellow gloves and ridiculous rubber jacket, dunking the day’s speculums into the hottest water, water so hot that the steam lifting from it had, on more than one occasion, melted her mascara—her eyes stuck shut then.