Justine

by Forsyth Harmon

  Chris ducked into one of the rooms and sat behind a big square wood desk. “How long have you been having these dreams?”

  Justine stretched out on her side along a ripped-up leather lounger, one hand propping her head, the other on her hip, like for leg lifts. “Ever since the electroshock, doctor.”

  The hall opened into a huge, high-ceilinged patient dorm with tall barred windows, everything covered in graffiti. A blue mattress sagged along a partition. I rested against it and Ryan loomed over me, a hand on either side of my head. It seemed like we stood there for a long time.

  “When the psychos fucked in here”—his exhalation was hot on my face and stank of malt liquor—“they had to do it all quiet and slow, out in the open.” My body flushed. He was going to kiss me. I wanted him to. I held my breath, closed my eyes.

  Justine’s heels struck the linoleum. Ryan backed away. Chris was chasing Justine across the dormitory.

  “I’ll order a lobotomy if you don’t take your medication!” he shouted after her.

  Justine bounced against the mattress, making me bounce too. “Save me from prefrontal surgery!” She squeezed my shoulders and shook.

  Ryan finished his Olde E, threw the empty can across the dorm, and walked off. It hit the floor with a tinny echo. I tightened, attraction and annoyance all twisted together.

  The dining room was lined with faded food-group posters: broccoli, 3082; peanuts, 4930; grapes, 3093. I could name all the PLU codes, except for fat, which didn’t have one; it was represented by a vague agglomeration of yellow triangles.

  In the kitchen: huge silver ovens, big black ranges. There was a toaster on the floor, long black electrical cord trailing after it. Justine stood on an industrial scale. I looked over her shoulder. She weighed 113 pounds with her shoes on. My stomach knotted. That was twelve pounds less than me, and she was probably four inches taller.

  *

  Outside the air was thick and lukewarm. The night made everything look like a black-and-white photograph: quaint white-shingled houses—probably once doctors’ residences—clustered atop silver hills. There was a half-burnt-down barn in the near distance. Farther off was a tall, curious shape in silhouette: a building climbed like a black staircase into the gray sky. We walked toward it in silence, up and down the grassy inclines. Justine trotted ahead, arms at her sides, hands fanning.

  We climbed in through a broken window. The sill was thick with sediment. Chris’s camera light swept across a ransacked room: overturned chairs, a three-legged bench. A pool table lay on its side near a bashed-in TV. Ryan kicked over an old sewing machine, and I jumped at the racket, caught at the edge of what turned out to be a Ping-Pong table. Chris stood at the center with the camcorder, spinning in a slow circle. We spun with him, following the spotlight, which revealed a mural, stretch by stretch. The mural wrapped around the entire space, spanning all four walls. It showed a cartoonish version of what the room might have looked like at one time: two men in light-blue button-down shirts playing chess; two others in white jumpsuits holding little paddles around that very same Ping-Pong table. The figures were weirdly proportioned, warped, out of balance. The chess players looked like they were melting into the board; the tiled floor seemed to lurch, the Ping-Pong players losing their footing, about to fall over.

  Chris spotlit a bald man sitting in a corner wearing a strait-jacket, purple rings around his eyes. Next to him, the only woman depicted sat erect in a white dress, hands folded in her lap, but I couldn’t see her face; the wall crumbled at her neck, disfiguring everything above the shoulders.

  “My grandmother painted this mural,” Justine whispered. “She was a patient here. She died here.” I wasn’t sure whether to believe her.

  *

  Outside it was almost totally dark, and the buildings and trees: everything looked menacing. Chris and Ryan walked ahead, and Justine leaned on me.

  “Walking in grass this tall, that’s how it feels to drink on medication.” She wobbled. “It’s like moving through Jell-O.”

  The upward-lilting O in “Jell-O” seemed to expand, becoming almost visible, creating an opening, a circle around us, some kind of intimate space. I felt it but didn’t know what to do with it. I should’ve said something. Asked something? I squeezed her little wrist, watching the boys’ backs, making sure they didn’t get too far ahead. What medication?

  “It’s the new shoes,” I said, too fast, just to say something. It wasn’t the right thing though.

  “Help!” She clutched at me and laughed, tripping over old railroad tracks.

  “Train used to stop here.” Ryan looked back at us. “The ward had its own Long Island Rail Road station.”

  “Yeah?” I asked. The O closed. Justine released my arm. I felt guilty but also relieved.

  We entered a low single-story building. From the outside it looked municipal. There was a kind of reception area, a short hall, and then a cement-floored room with a wheeled silver table in the middle and big drawers built into the wall. Ryan grabbed a scalpel and threw it at the door; it stuck like a dart. Justine wandered over to the drawers. She pulled at a knee-level handle. The drawer slid open, and she climbed onto a long metal tray. She lay down, folded her arms across her chest, and closed her eyes.

  “Push me in!” she shouted.

  “Do it,” Chris said, recording.

  I pushed. She disappeared into the wall feetfirst. Her voice was muffled; she sang something about a comatose girlfriend.

  Ryan threw what were probably autopsy tools at the drawer: what looked like Grandma’s hacksaw, scissors, cartwheeled through the air, clanged against the metal, and clattered to the ground. Chris shook his head behind the camera.

  “La la la la,” Justine sang over the metal clangs, “la la la la la.”

  I couldn’t stand it. I pulled out the tray and she jumped up, stretching her arms over her head as though energized after a nap.

  We walked back toward the car. Justine skipped. Two flashlights flared from the street side of the fence. There was a cop car parked right behind mine, but no one turned to run. They kept walking. Ryan put his hand on the small of my back, half like he was reassuring me, half like he was just pushing. He climbed back over the fence like nothing, approaching the cops on the other side.

  “Damn,” the Black cop said. “It’s the lieutenant’s kid.”

  Ryan waved.

  “Shit.” The white cop spit on the side of the road. “Go home and give your mother a kiss.”

  “Give your little sister a kiss!” The Black one laughed.

  I unlocked Grandma’s Escort and we all got in.

  “Fuck off, Sarge,” Ryan shouted, pulling the door shut. He winked at me in the rearview.

  *

  The next day at work was slow, and boring without Justine. I worked with Michelle. She held a plastic bag full of peanuts in her plump fist.

  “4930?” I tried.

  “These are salted,” she sighed, blowing those thin bangs back from her narrow forehead. “4932.” Michelle had the hair of a baby chick. She punched the code into the register and slid the bag down to me. It joined the other items at the foot of the checkout: regular Coke, nacho cheese Doritos. I eyed the woman who presumably ingested these things. I unfolded one paper bag, slid a second inside, and punched it open, but the second didn’t unfold entirely, I couldn’t get it to align with the first; I was furious. Michelle passed a tub of Breyers Neapolitan ice cream over the sensor. I fit it at the bottom of the double paper bag with a carton of milk and stacked a tub of sour cream and a bar of cheddar on top, just like Justine taught me. I loaded the bags into the cart, bent forward, reached my hands to my feet.

  “Back hurt?” Michelle asked.

  I nodded, grasping the counter edge as blood rushed from my head. A field of white stars opened up, then closed again. I was starving.

  “Just wait and see what it feels like in three years.”

  I stared at the candy rack and felt those twelve excess pounds—that
was more than Marlena weighed—at my hips, in my thighs.

  Michelle bent over the conveyor belt and scratched a lottery ticket with a nickel.

  “I won!” she shouted.

  “You what?”

  “Two dollars.”

  “It’s freezing in here.”

  “Not really.” Michelle offered me a sweatshirt so hideous I preferred to stay cold. “Quick break?” She checked her Tamagotchi. “Mimitchi turned into a teen!” She switched off the lane light. “If Theresa asks, I’m reshelving.”

  I looked at the new Vogue. Nicole Kidman descended a spiral staircase in a gray silk sleeveless gown, hair piled on top of her head, a choker encircling her neck like a diamond vine. There was something so delicate, precious, and ultimately cold about her arched eyebrows, her little nose, her serious gaze, her entire way of being that annoyed me. I put Justine there with her on the stairs and they passed each other wordlessly, without even the slightest acknowledgment, exiting opposite sides of the magazine cover like rivals in a historical period drama.

  A hand hit the conveyor belt hard, unsettling the magazine. Blood-red nails, a gold charm bracelet dangling from a slim wrist. I followed a tan arm up to a shoulder, a tense neck tendon, idling for a moment at an impeccably formed ear, lovely little lobe sparkling with a big diamond stud. Gorgeous girl.

  “Were you at the psych ward last night?” Her voice was raspy and tight.

  I closed the magazine, rested my hands on the cover.

  She looked me up and down, lips pursed, brow hard, big dark eyes flashing. “What, this one doesn’t talk?” She was short, and not thin—plump, even—and radiant, hair shining too, slicked back into a low tight bun.

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t even know who she was. But I knew then that Ryan was hers. Had he told her about me, or had it been Justine?

  “You think you’re the first one?”

  I pressed my lips together. There had been no kiss, only a hand at the back.

  She laughed, shaking her perfectly round head like I’d said it out loud. “You know what?”

  I held my breath.

  She just smiled and walked out, twirling a key chain around her finger, a big yellow Northport Yacht Club floating fob, a BMW logo. She was probably wearing real Chanel Vamp nail polish, not knockoff Revlon Vixen. I didn’t breathe until she was out of sight.

  When Michelle got back, she checked her Tamagotchi again. “It almost died!” she groaned. “You have to tell me if it beeps when I’m away from the register!”

  FIVE

  I inhaled Marlena’s downy little furs, suspended in space, lit up by the morning sun.

  “How lazy you are,” I said, burying my face in her side. “Din latta misse,” I hissed.

  She lifted a paw in warning, then gnawed at a claw. The way the light came through the window, her face was half lit, half in shadow, one pupil huge and the other just a narrow black slice. Her tiny rib cage winged in and out with each quick breath.

  I heard if you blink your eyes really slowly and deliberately, it mimics the way a cat communicates contentment. So I thought, eyes open: “I”; eyes closed: “love”; and “you,” eyes open again.

  I got out of bed, used the bathroom, emptying myself, not showering yet since water adds weight to hair. I removed my pajamas and folded them neatly beneath my pillow. I made the bed, then pulled the scale out from under it, tapped it with my toe, waiting for the zero to appear. I stepped onto the center, experiencing a kind of merry anxiety as the green lights formed the digits 124.5.

  I found a half-filled composition notebook, located the first blank page, and drew an x- and y-axis along the bottom and left edges, then marked the x-axis with dates and numbered the y from 115 to 125. I penciled in a small circle at July 1, 124.5. I wrapped a cloth tape measure around my chest, my waist, my hips, then noted the measurements: “B 35, W 26, H 36.” I thought of something we’d read in English class and flipped back through the notebook to find my Lolita notes: “. . . thigh girth (just below the gluteal sulcus) seventeen . . .” I took my thigh measurement and added it—“T 22”—to the list.

  I sat on the shower floor and shaved my legs, pulling a razor across my inner thigh. Why couldn’t you just slice the flesh off? Wouldn’t it just scar over? I skimmed off a thin layer of skin covering an ingrown hair at my groin, squeezing the flesh around it, pushing a coarse black bristle to the surface, watching the blood come, then wash away with hot water. I pinched at the little pockets of fat inside and above my knees, at my armpits. I shaved the few hairs off my big toes. My pinkie toes curled under. They looked deformed.

  “Didn’t you just do that?” I stood barefoot, wrapped in a towel, looking into the kitchen.

  Grandma was on her hands and knees with a sponge and a bucket. She was playing her Perry Como Today tape. “Det är smutsigt igen,” she said, pulling at her pants waistband. “Too tight.” She stood up, got scissors from the drawer, and cut the elastic. “I hate when it’s tight.” She slammed the drawer. “I was up at 4:00 a.m. this morning digging up the damn rhododendron. You want juice?”

  “Nej.” I shook my head and the towel wrapped around it unraveled, leaving my hair in a wet tangle. “Liquids are a waste of calories.”

  “Vad?” She fished her dentures out of a glass next to the sink, popped them into her mouth, and took the Fancy Feast bag from the cabinet. Marlena shot into the kitchen at the crinkling sound and meowed at her empty bowl. Grandma tried to pour the food, Marlena got in her way, and Grandma kicked her. The cat yowled, then was back at the full bowl again like a magnet.

  “This isn’t a farm.”

  “He’s so lazy.” Grandma waved her hand in dismissal.

  “She.”

  “How beautiful you look today.” Grandma smiled, getting back on her knees. She sang along with Como about Hawaii in her deep alto. She seemed to have picked up an affected vibrato, I guessed from church. “There’s still pie,” she said.

  “No.”

  “How about cookies?” She looked up at me. “I’ll make pepparkakor. Your mother loved pepparkakor.”

  My stomach got tight. “That’s for Christmas.” I bit the inside of my lip, it bled.

  Grandma wrung the sponge into the bucket. “She doesn’t want nothing,” she said, vigorously scrubbing. She returned to her singing.

  I tiptoed across the wet floor and got the leftmost yogurt from the fridge.

  “Don’t you love Perry Cuomo?” she asked.

  “Mario Cuomo,” I said. “Perry Como.”

  “Well excuse me for living,” she said. “The car smells, you know.”

  *

  I left early for work and drove around for a while, trying to empty the gas tank. I went past Justine’s street but not her house. I drove past their high school. The sign out front—“Northport High School: We Plan to Succeed”—had been spray-painted over to say “Northport, a High School: We Plan to Smoke Weed.” Funny.

  I saw Ryan inside the Express Mart and pulled into the Hess station. He sauntered over, hands shoved into the pockets of huge khaki pants belted halfway down his flat ass.

  As he took the big headphones from his ears, I switched the radio station from Z100 to Hot 97. He nodded at me through the windshield, making that same puckered face of disdain. I pulled cat hair from my shirt. When I rolled down the window, he grinned a little.

  “You like Black Star?” He lifted his chin, looking down at me.

  “What?”

  He pointed at the pump.

  “Regular.”

  “Black Star,” he said, squinting at the car stereo. “‘Respiration,’ featuring Common, from the ’98 album Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star.” When he inserted the pump into the tank, I felt a warm embarrassment. He paced back and forth, frowning, hands in his pockets, one of them bulging with his Discman.

  “Sure,” I lied.

  He flashed that smug smile. “Know where they got their name?”

  I shook my head, feeling momentari
ly tender, wanting him to tell me. He just needed to tell someone something.

  “The Black Star shipping line, founded in 1919 by Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey, organizer of the Universal Negro Improvement Association,” he said, zoning out on the Dunkin’ Donuts across the street. “In fact,” he continued, forgetting me, as if off reading a book by himself somewhere, “reggae singer Fred Locks, an adherent of the Rastafari faith, first reintroduced the idea of the Black Star Line to a Jamaican audience with his 1976 hit ‘Black Star Liner,’ which has been called one of the most important songs in reggae music of the 1970s.”

  The pump signaled disengagement, breaking his meditation. He looked at me, checking to see if I was still listening. I smiled.

  “In ‘Black Star Liner,’ Locks portrays Garvey as a Moses-like prophet,” he said, pleased, I could tell, that I seemed to be listening. For a moment he didn’t look ugly. He looked sort of normal. I kind of liked his freckled face.

  “Know what?” he asked, suddenly friendly. “What you need is one of my custom-made educational mixtapes. The best in tristate hip-hop from ’87 to present. $11.97.”

  I handed him twelve, fingertips grazing his dry palm.

  “Yo!” he shouted, but not at me.

  Another boy rolled toward us on a skateboard. He was wearing a wool winter hat even though it was eighty degrees. He hopped off and tucked the board under his arm. “Just an O.”