by Nami Mun
Waiting for the mother to open up, I glanced down at my pink case and realized that Avon spelled backwards was Nova. Reading upside down made me queasy. They shouldn’t call it morning sickness if it happens all day. A few minutes went by. Nobody came to the door. I knocked on the next apartment.
“Nobody home!” a woman shouted.
“Okay, but you can’t say that because I can hear you.”
“Sorry. Nobody home!” she said again.
On my notepad I scribbled the last two apartment numbers so I knew to bug them again tomorrow. A woman came up the stairs then, passed me in the hallway, and stopped two units down. She knocked, and after a little while she began whispering into the door. I worried she was also selling. She was blond and dressed in matching lavender. I couldn’t compete with lavender. My skirt, the color of sidewalk, hung loose around my waist, enough to be spun around, and my knee-highs crept down my calves with my every step. Everything on the lavender woman was fitted, and everything matched. She wasn’t carrying anything except a hat and an umbrella, though. No merchandise meant she couldn’t be in sales, so I eased up and moved on to the next apartment.
“Get away from the door!” a man shouted between coughing fits.
“I have Wild Country aftershave if you’d like to—”
“You don’t leave, I’m calling the fucking cops!”
I took out my notepad: Apt. 3C = man, mean, cops. I took a deep breath and reminded myself of the Avon sales motto: The more NOs you get, the better the odds of the next one being a YES. The slogan made no sense but I couldn’t help but believe it. As I was putting my notepad away, I caught the lavender woman staring at me. She had seen me getting yelled at, getting rejected, so I looked to her, to tell her that it wasn’t a big deal and that this sort of stuff came with the territory. What I didn’t expect was for her to come toward me.
“I’m done,” she said.
By the time I thought to ask her what she meant, she was already on the first-floor landing, pulling her hat down tight and readying her umbrella for the weather outside.
I stared at the doorway where she’d stood. The apartment numbers were long gone but the paint still held the shadow of 3D. I walked up to the door, looked around, and listened to what sounded like choir music, a high wispy note ghosting through the walls. I raised my hand to give a knock until the rosary caught my eye. Wooden beads, faded and cracked, wrapped twice around the doorknob. It didn’t belong there. Neither did the birdhouse nailed above the peephole. Or maybe it was a cuckoo clock. Whatever it was, green painted-on vines swarmed the wooden walls, the tin roof, and the tiny door, which was dotted by a doorknob the size of a grape seed. I touched the knob, feeling like a doll too big for her dollhouse.
“Who is it?”
I snapped my hand back. It was a woman’s voice. “Hi, I’m the Avon Lady,” I said, into the peephole.
“Oh, that’s lovely.” Her voice was high and breathy. I pictured an old twig of a grandmother on the other side. “I’m Sister Janine.”
“Okay,” I said, noticing the rosary again, the gaps between the beads. “Listen, maybe I should come back tomorrow? It’s getting late and I’m sure you—”
“It’s only eight-thirty. We have time before Hart to Hart comes on.”
“If you say so.” I pulled up my knee-highs, gripped the handle of my case with both hands, straightened my posture, and waited for her to open up. Somebody in the building was making popcorn. And somebody started playing scales on the piano.
“Whenever you’re ready, I’m at your service,” she said, but the door didn’t budge.
I didn’t understand. “I’m sorry . . . I usually show my samples, in person, you know, inside the apartments.” When I said this, she giggled.
“Did I say something funny?”
“Oh, you mustn’t think I’m ridiculing you.”
Until she said this, I didn’t think she was.
“This is your first time, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Actually, I’ve been doing this for about a—”
“Best to just think of me as a telephone operator,” she went on. “You never see the operator, right?”
I put my samples down. Getting her to open up was going to take some work.
“And that means I am not a body. I am a voice that connects you to God and nothing more. How long ago was your last confession?”
I stepped back. I checked behind me to see if someone was playing a trick. There was only a garbage chute and, below that, a broken turntable.
“Are you still there?” she asked.
“I think so.”
I stared at the rosary and remembered the woman in lavender. I’m done, she’d said, as though I’d been waiting in line behind her.
“Are you Catholic?”
I thought about my parents’ church. “No. Just a Presbyterian.”
The eye of the peephole seemed to darken right then. “That’s all right,” she said. “I take all kinds.”
I dropped to the ground and peered through a gap, about an inch thick, between the door and carpet. Pink fuzzy slippers paced back and forth. “I’m having a two-for-one sale on mascara right now, are you interested?” I got up and peeked into the peephole.
“... I’m your mother, your best friend, your lover, your therapist. I am whatever you need in order to open up to God. And it sounds like you really need to open up.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I said, it sounds like you need to show your true self to God.”
“You don’t even know me.” She was starting to piss me off.
“Don’t be so sure.”
“Well, then you should know that I’m fine,” I said, as politely as possible.
“Of course you’re fine, we’re all fine. How about you, Mr. Coffee Table? Are you fine? I’m fine. And you, Miss Martini, you hanging in there? Because if you’re fine, then I’m fine. We’re all fine. But couldn’t we be finer?”
She was taking my lines. That was what I told my customers when they tried to back out of a sale. They’d say, I’m happy with my look, and I’d say, But don’t you want to be happier?
“I don’t know what to tell you, but if you’re not gonna buy something—”
“Here, a little handout for you,” she said, and a pink flyer slid through the gap. It was titled “How to Confess,” followed by step-by-step instructions. Step one read: Forgive me, Sister, for I have sinned, it’s been (insert length of time) since my last confession. Step three said: Whether your sins are mortal, venial, or slight imperfections, simply tell God all your troubles and you will be forgiven, guaranteed!
“Are the instructions clear?”
“Absolutely,” I said, backing away. “I’ll be sure to come by tomorrow.” I took out my notepad and wrote: 3D, crazy nun lady.
“Well, we can start now if you’d like.”
“I’ll just take this home with me, to study it. Okay?”
She didn’t answer.
“Did you hear me?”
“Yes,” she whispered, “but couldn’t you just confess to one thing?”
Her words trembled. I looked up and down the hallway, searching for something to explain what was happening. “Listen, I really don’t have anything to say to you, okay? Everything’s going good right now.” I checked for her feet under her door—they didn’t move. “When I have something to spill, I promise I’ll come back.”
The piano scales sounded eerie against her silence, and then her crying. Her weeping was a rusty swing set creaking in the wind. I didn’t have time for this. I barely understood my own grief. I grabbed the rosary, slipped it in my pocket along with the flyer. My skirt sagged a little. “I’ll come back another time,” I said, almost as a promise, and inched away. I considered whether skipping out on a crying nun was a sin and whether that was worse than stealing her rosary. At the first-floor landing, I decided that stealing was definitely worse. Before I opened the door to leave the building, I thought I could hear her a
sking if I was still there, but maybe my guilt had imagined her voice. The whole building smelled of burned popcorn. I needed a hit. It was time to go home.
Home was an abandoned apartment I shared with roughly twenty people. Except for my Audrey Hepburn poster hanging by two nails, the space was pretty empty. A couch with no cushions sat opposite the front door, and the rest of the living room writhed with rows of sleeping bodies. It was past midnight. The traffic light outside our window tinted the room in red, green, and then yellow. I’d shot up in the ferry bathroom and had already spent a few hours sleeping on the deck, dreaming that a man was rubbing my back and telling me not to worry about things like sins or sacrifice. The kitchen light was on and below the light was Jonesy, asleep, his limbs and clumpy hair splattered all over our futon. I took off my sneakers and squeezed my feet between sleeping thighs, ears, and elbows and made my way diagonally.
We all took turns sleeping on the futon. That night, while I wiped down my sample case in the kitchen sink, Jonesy woke up, tapped the futon, and told me it was okay for me to sleep with him. He said this in a way that made me think I had once asked him for permission.
“If I sleep with you tonight, does that mean I’ll lose my turn when it comes up?”
“Yup!” Wimpy shouted from the bathroom.
I told Jonesy thanks but no thanks, that I’d rather stick it out.
“Suit yourself.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You always do.”
I didn’t know what he meant by this—I’d only been living there a week, maybe ten days. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.” He shook out his sleeping bag, sending to the linoleum a spent syringe and a bag of Chips Ahoy.
“No, really. Tell me.”
“Well, since you ask.” He found the pipe he was looking for. “We think you’re sort of selfish.” He lit up, took a hit, and exhaled long enough for me to feel envy. “You see, the girls here share themselves, but not you. You think you’re too good for—”
“I’m pregnant,” I said, surprising myself. I’d never said the word out loud.
“Shit.” He took another big drag and slapped his forehead. “Am I the father?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“We’ve never had sex,” I said.
“Thank. Fucking. God.”
Jonesy was an okay guy. He sold stolen bicycles but never stole them himself. He said he was too out of shape for that kind of work even though he was tall and thin and looked healthy enough.
“Pregnant!” Wimpy bolted from the bathroom, holding the water bucket we used to flush the toilet. “Oh, for fuck sake, big congrats to ya!”
Wimpy was from England and smoked a lot of meth. I almost said thanks.
“I’m not keeping it,” I told her.
“What! Why the fuck not!”
“Because I’m sixteen.”
“So? We were all young once. And you’d make a great mum.”
I thought about my own mother. “I don’t think so,” I said. “And plus, I don’t have any money.”
“But you have us!”
“You have less money.”
“I’m just trying to help. You don’t have to be nasty about it.” She marched off and sulked at the other end of the kitchen counter. She was the toughest girl I knew and also the most sensitive. One time I overheard a guy asking her why she was called Wimpy. She punched him in the gut and said, “Because I’m not.”
I walked up to her. “I’m sorry, Wimp. I can’t seem to do anything right today.”
“That’s fine.” She fired up the little burner someone had made out of two soda can bottoms. “I’m not hurt. I’m used to people’s nastiness.” She opened a tub of Spam, slid the pink block onto the counter, and scraped off the gelatin using her fingernails. With a bobby pin she found in her hair, she sliced the meat into three thick hunks.
“You want one?”
I shook my head.
She skewered a slab with the prongs of her pin and grilled it over the flame. The oily coating sparked.
“Hey, Wimp?”
“Yup.”
“You ever been pregnant?”
“Millions of times. It’s beautiful, that feeling, you know? I’d bite my entire arm off to be knocked up again.”
“Wow. The entire arm. I really didn’t expect you to say that.”
“Oh sure. There’s nothing like having an amphibian inside your body.”
“Or that.”
“Just think about it! It can live underwater! It’s like a reptile.” She turned over the meat. “That’s what I wanted to study when I was a nipper. Turtles and alligators and reptiles. What is that, a terpetologist? A perpetologist? Whatever the name, that’s what I wanted to be. Why you nattering on about reptiles anyway?”
I told her that I wasn’t.
“Then why so many bloody questions about them then?”
“But . . . I only asked because... because I’m pregnant.”
“Pregnant! I ruddy well better congratulate ya then, shouldn’t I?” She put the meat down to give me a hug.
“Hey, Wimp?”
“Yeah?”
“How many bags you smoke today?”
“You reckon it’s a boy or a girl? If it’s a girl, let’s name her Pippa. I always wanted to name a girl Pippa because—”
“I’m not having it,” I said, maybe too harshly.
She touched my hand and whispered, “Why the fuck not?”
“Wimpy?”
“Yeah?”
“We just talked about this, like five seconds ago.”
“What? You winding me up?” She took her skewer off the fire and nibbled. “Well, was I funny at least?”
“Hilarious.” Suddenly I felt tired—tired enough to consider Jonesy’s futon offer. He was already passed out, though.
“You going to have it then?” Wimpy asked, and I grabbed her shoulders. “I am not going to have it. I don’t want it. Don’t you understand? It’s impossible for me to have it.” I hadn’t realized I was shaking her. It felt good and I couldn’t stop. She was light, like an old paper doll.
“My . . . Spam . . . needs . . . me,” she said, and I finally let go. She looked confused. Like a kid waiting in the rain for a school bus that wasn’t coming. She nibbled at her dinner without saying another word, and I trudged into the bathroom, knowing I had hurt her feelings. With the door closed, I took off my blouse and hung it on a clothesline we had tied to two exposed pipes in the wall. I hung my skirt, too, with the rosary still in it. The tub was dry and peeling. I stepped into it and lay there awhile, touching my belly, the start of a swell, wondering if the baby could sense my father’s temper and my mother’s insanity through my hands.
As soon as I fell into the silence, Wimpy barged in and told me about the bleach.
“See? The stain just disappears!” she said, her body unable to contain her excitement as she poured bleach onto an old rag.
“I’m not so sure about this, Wimp.”
“No, no, no, it’s really easy. All we have to do is saturate the tampon.” She fished a plastic cup from the trash, dumped out the sludge that was in there into the sink, poured in the bleach, and held the tampon by the string, dipping it into the cup like a teabag. “Then you put it way up in there, deeper than normal.”
“That sounds like it’s gonna hurt. Does it hurt?”
“How the fuck should I know? Now, you ready to crack-on or not?”
“Who taught you this?”
“People do it all the time,” she said, and handed me the cup.
“And it works?”
“I don’t look like a doctor, now do I? It works or it doesn’t, that’s the best I can do.”
“It smells awful.”
“Here I am trying to help you snuff that little bugger and all you do is complain.” She turned her back to me, shaking her head.
I apologized but she wouldn’t face me.
“I’m not u
pset,” she said, picking at a wad of gum stuck to her foot. “It just hurts when people don’t believe the things I say.”
I again told her I was sorry. “I wasn’t sure at first, but I trust you. You know lots of things,” I said. “I’ll do it now. I promise.”
“Really?” She finally turned around. “Okay. I’ll be right out here if you need me,” she said, leaving the bathroom.
“Hey, Wimp?” I stopped the door from closing.
She cupped my face with both hands. “Yeah?”
“You ever been to confession?”
“Fuck no,” she said, and gave me a tiny slap. “Love means never having to say you’re sorry. Remember that.”
After she left I sat on the toilet and tried to understand what she could’ve meant. I had no idea. The cup stared at me from the edge of the sink, and I thought about the baby and tried to picture me as its mother. I wondered what my own mother would think of me being pregnant. She’d dig in there and kill the baby herself. Kill it with her own bare hands while crying to God.
I grabbed my sneakers, shoved the tampon deep into the left one, and then put them both on. The cold wetness stung my toes. I’d go for a walk and toss it in the trash.
When I came out of the bathroom Wimpy looked at me with teary eyes and hugged me with a lot of feeling. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that,” she said.
First, I went to a hospital.
In the crowded emergency room, a nurse behind the counter told me they didn’t perform that sort of thing there, that I should go to a clinic. Then she asked me to step aside since I didn’t really have an emergency. “Tell that to my stomach,” I told her. She said that wasn’t where the baby was.
Then I went to a clinic.
The sun felt cold, and I was proud of myself for having shot up exactly the right amount. Just enough to see the world without being in it. Everything—the cars and buses and curses from cabbies, the bodies that rushed by, as well as the ones that surrounded me like zombies—appeared beautiful and cinematic in my private viewfinder. “God loves you. This is from God,” a woman whispered right in my ear, holding out an egg. She clung to my arm. Her hair smelled of wood polish. We were in the middle of the sidewalk, in front of the clinic, and the woman had silver hair and blue discs for eyes. “I really love you,” I told her, and was certain that that was the right answer. I walked past her, and now a boy came forward, a blond one, wearing a keyboard necktie. “God loves you. This is from God,” he said. I fingered his tie like I was playing a song and moved past him, almost running over a girl who came up to my waist. She was maybe five years old. “God told me you can have this,” the girl said, smiling, offering her gift with both hands. I took the egg. It was hardboiled. The sky was blue and had been swept clean of clouds. I wondered if it was Easter. I thanked the girl, put the egg in my jacket pocket, and walked into the clinic.