by Mona Awad
9.
All week, I go home alone to the apartment where Ava pronounced I should not live. I eat the generic-brand cans of chili I bought last fall in anticipation of a hurricane that turned out to be nothing but a light and dismal rain. I pour the several-months-old bottle of wine in my fridge that tastes like acidic needles into a souvenir mug featuring the Falls of Falling, my hometown, and drink.
Probably you have visited the Falls of Falling. For like an hour, a half day, a day and night tops, you parked in event parking, even though there is no event there but water. You stood against the railing for a selfie or a family photo, the Falls roaring behind you, donning shorts you’ll later regret, trying to smile or maybe really smiling as the water sprays your legs and arms and hair with endless mist. Maybe afterward, you took that boat ride called Under the Falls, where you don’t actually go under the Falls because that would literally kill you, wearing one of those thin yellow slickers that fails to keep you from being drenched to the bone, because I wasn’t there to tell you it’s not worth it. I was in downtown Falling, a place no one goes but the people of Falling, likely in my teacher’s office getting in trouble for the stories I submitted instead of math homework, or in my mother’s hair salon writing them, or in my room or on the branches of the thin trees outside dreaming myself elsewhere.
Probably you didn’t go to downtown Falling but maybe you went so far as to make a day of it on the cheesy main drag by the water—toured the lame arcades, got lost in the mirror maze I was too tall for by the age of nine, sampled the “ice cream of the future,” had a surf-and-turf dinner at a restaurant shaped like a ship. Cut into a dry steak by its porthole windows under a net full of fake fish, enjoying the music of Heart, which is everywhere, as though piped into the mist-filled air. If you happened to be there around Halloween, you might have gone to the live-action haunted house, where a man in a hockey mask comes out of a meat locker and chases you around black-as-pitch tunnels with a fake chain saw. From 1985 to 1992, this man was my father. Maybe you dropped some pennies at the casino, where he later worked, climbing his way up the ladder from waiter to manager.
But I doubt you did any of those things unless you have a mullet or a deep sense of irony.
Likely you left Falling after the waterfall selfie and didn’t look back. Maybe on the way out you bought an overpriced shot glass, or a mug like this one. Or a magnet with a Falls pic better than the ones you took. Perhaps it’s getting struck by a rainbow. I’m Falling for You. My mom gave me one that said that once, as a joke. I took it with me everywhere. Put it on every fridge I’ve ever had since, even this one. This summer I gave it to Ava, who put it on her fridge.
Our fridge, she said.
I drink more needle wine. Listen to the perverted giant next door laughing at a sitcom but never along with the laugh track. I wonder how he lives in that small, low-ceilinged room when he is larger than any human. The cheap black rubber boots he leaves outside his chipped front door could club a seal. Above me, the Ever-Practicing Opera Singer sings songs from a D-list opera. She sounds like a schizophrenic songbird gone off the rails. I keep my curtains shut lest Flasher Man is sitting on my fire escape again, waiting with bated breath to show me his glittered junk. Always naked despite the chill of the evening. Cock in hand, clouding up the glass with his breath, staring at me or not, I never keep the curtains open long enough to find out. Also, whenever I open them now, there is that same bunny sitting there on the sill like he never left. Staring at me.
I finish off the wine and attempt to write. I must write, I have to write. Writing is why I’m here. I stare at my open notebook, blank for all but one badly drawn eye. A few swirls. The words I don’t know scratched over and over again. Surrounded by limp flowers.
I long for my first writing office, the waiting area of the hair salon where my mother worked when I was a child. I wrote with such feverish abandon on that sagging couch between the dusty Buddha and the dustier fake flowers, beneath framed photos of women smiling under impossibly, painfully elaborate arrangements of hair. Clients would sit in waiting area chairs nearby, pretending to read magazines but all the while regarding me askance, a lanky child in a Swamp Thing T-shirt clutching her mermaid journal close, staring at them through bangs I barely ever let my mother cut. I was afraid she’d gouge out my eyes.
Whatcha workin’ on there? they might ask me.
Uncovering your secret shame, I thought.
Don’t mind my daughter, my mother would say as she led them to a chair, tilted their heads back into a wash sink where they’d immediately close their eyes. I’d watch them sit caped in their swivel chairs, looking straight ahead into the mirror like they were contending with their faces for the first time. They’d say things—addressing her or their own reflection, I could never tell. Things I couldn’t catch over the sound of The Best of Heart and the drone of hair dryers that I would try desperately to guess at.
I am actually a lizard person.
I commune with aliens in the evenings, that’s why I need my hair like this.
There is a squirrel in the park who is a man who is my lover. The dye job is for him.
Tonight I shall jump headfirst into the falls with my new permed extensions flying beautifully behind me.
She’d nod or laugh as she took a brush, a pair of scissors, a razor, a hot iron to their slightly bowed heads full of clips, wrapped their wet locks one by one into little squares of tinfoil, then made them sit under what I believed, at the time, to be brain-sucking head ovens. There they’d contentedly cook, flipping through magazines.
Sometimes my mother wouldn’t lead the man or woman to a swivel chair, but to a small, dimly lit treatment room down the hall. The sounds emanating from behind that closed door were the source of all my early horror stories. I heard barklike screams, grunts. Nervous laughter. Softer screams too, almost like sighs. Other loud nonverbal sounds that I didn’t understand, that scared and puzzled and thrilled me. I expected clients to emerge from this room with scorched faces, gills cut deep into their cheeks, horns hammered into their heads. But when they came out, nothing looked different about them at all, except their faces were slightly flushed.
A waxing room, she never told me, but then I never asked.
The fevered stories I wrote in the hair salon were all rip-offs of the thriller and horror paperbacks she devoured on breaks and in the evenings, which I read on the sly. I based the characters on her clients, my classmates, teachers who distressed me.
Let me see, she’d say, seeing me writing in the evening.
It’s not ready, I’d say, even though it absolutely was.
Your daughter submitted this to the essay-writing contest and I have to say we are quite concerned by the content, never mind that it isn’t an essay, my teacher later informed my mother.
Oh, please, my mother said. Samantha’s scared of her own shadow. She just has a vivid imagination. What kid doesn’t? Though I knew she was worried. My increasingly horrific and fantastic version of events. Telling her all manner of lies in answer to questions like So how was school? instead of whatever boring thing really happened. Disappearing into my room or into the thin cluster of trees behind our apartment complex with my mermaid notebook. What are you doing in there, my mother would say through the crack in the bedroom door, as if I wasn’t in a room in her apartment, but a distant place, far from her reach, where I’d decided to live instead of here.
I don’t have those hair salon novels anymore. I like to think they were swallowed up in the Falls after she died. In my memory, those years remain my most prolific writing period although I’ve never really not written, never not had another world of my own making to escape to, never known how to be in this world without most of my soul dreaming up and living in another. Until I came here.
Sometimes it’s good to take a break, the Lion said to me last January, whisking his tea. Focus on other things. Read. Be a guest i
n other worlds. Perhaps you’re growing. Evolving. Trust, Samantha. Patience.
We were meeting in his office to discuss why I hadn’t turned in any new writing. At that point, our friendship had already fallen away. We were still meeting, but only every couple of weeks or so now, and only in his office and only with the door open. I never asked why he no longer emailed me playlists in the middle of the night or asked me to drink Scotch with him in the middle of the day, and he never explained.
Nothing at all to be ashamed of, he said. Tight smile.
I guess I just don’t understand what happened, I said, squinting, the sunlight from his window backlighting him and blinding me. To me, I mean. I used to write all the time. And now . . .
These things have their own ebbs and flows, he said, and looked pointedly at his watch.
And then I felt insane. Like I’d imagined his warmth, our closeness.
Bullshit, Ava said. I bet he cooled off because of the bonobos. I bet they saw you guys getting friendly and got their sugar whiskers in a twist. Started a rumor and he freaked out like a little pussy-man. He’s not a lion, he’s a lemming.
I told myself to get a grip, focus on my writing, forget about him. He wasn’t even our Workshop leader anymore, just my thesis advisor. What did he really owe me beyond an occasional email check-in? On paper, absolutely nothing.
Fuck him. You have me now.
I look at my phone. Nothing from Ava. Look back at my mostly blank page but all I see is the Lion’s face in his office that day.
You’re thinking about it too much, Samantha. Really.
Maybe. So should we meet next week then? I asked him.
Why don’t we hold off for now. Not a question. Just send me something when you’re ready.
I haven’t sent him anything since then. I was planning to before the summer hit, but then the spring party happened. If things had been awkward between us before, they were impossible after that.
Theoretically I should have checked in with him a couple of times over the summer. I definitely should have checked in this week, sent work toward my thesis, updates on my progress. But I haven’t reached out and he hasn’t either. I can’t bear the idea of facing him now. And there’s nothing but a bunch of eyes and sad flowers and I don’t knows to give him anyway.
* * *
—
I close my empty notebook. Shower in my graying tub. Brush my teeth in the chipped sink, avoiding my reflection in the rusty little mirror. Instead I stare at the cracked yellow tiles above the ancient toilet that the one man I slept with here said reminded him of a navy ship. I was rich once. Briefly. After my mother died. When, as a morose thirteen-year-old, I went to live with my nomadic father, following him across the country as he chased one vivid dream of wealth after another that only he could see. I never understood what it was he did for a living, exactly. Talk shit, my mother once said, drunk. My father called it real estate development, business opportunities here and abroad, Samantha, having vision, eyes to see. A chain of resorts in South America. A spa on the Black Sea. He just needed investors, people who saw what he saw, people who believed. Then he found them—a Middle Eastern prince or two, some big-thinking Bulgarians, a slew of Texans—and overnight, our life changed.
It lasted only a few years, his good fortune, my glimpse into what I imagine to be the Bunny life. Spring breaks and summers spent in centrally located hotels that were once castles. Spa treatments that involved sea kelp. Sinks deep as oceans. Mattresses like dreams. Tall windows that looked onto manicured parks, rolling hills, crashing waves. Everything in that other life was stretched and gleaming and perfumed. Each room had a temperature I could control with the turn of a little dial. I should have felt like God. Instead I forgot that I had ever been poor. It grew so normal so quickly, that life. In my memory of this time, I sit looking bored out the window onto the most beautiful, serene stretch of the world left to look at, not even seeing it. Wearing a string of pearls that, the first time they were clasped around my neck, felt like strangling but after a week felt like nothing at all.
So you were a Bunny, Ava said from behind her cloud of smoke, when I told her.
I was not.
You so were. She narrowed her eyes and pointed her cigarette at me. It all makes sense now.
What does?
She stared at me until I looked away.
You’re too crushed and obsessed about being poor to have always been poor, she said, leaning back in her chair like she should know.
I looked at her in her blue dragon kimono, so perfectly worn and ripped you’d think she’d planned it. Reclining in the red velvet chair we lifted off someone’s curb on trash day. Her red-painted toes poking out of the holes in her fishnet tights like candy. The light from her stolen lamp buzzing over her feathery head like a flickering motel sign. Sipping champagne from a wide-mouthed flute. Where does she get it? Never mind. Places. Ava never seems to worry about money. Yet somehow her apartment is like a movie of arty poverty in Paris. Run-down but chicly so.
You’re better off, Ava said. You are, Smackie. You could use a few rips in your soul’s kimono. Seriously. A little fall never hurt anyone, you know? Also, you need to learn to kill your own spiders. Referring to my spiders-in-the-bathtub problem, which she was taking care of for me. Just don’t go crazy on the violins. Don’t trade one kind of blindness for another.
Yeah, I said. Wait. What’s that supposed to mean?
But she just sipped her champagne.
Now I text her I miss you. I text her Everything okay? I text her Did I do something wrong? And then I text her Whatever I did, I’m sorry. I text her There is a giant spider in my bathroom. Because probably there is.
Nothing.
Then one morning, six mornings later, I wake up from a terrible dream in which my hands are full of blood and white feathers. I get a text. Two texts. Three texts! Four texts!!! I’m so excited, I lunge for the phone, but it isn’t from Ava.
Troll emoji. Tulip. Open-armed ghost.
And then Hey girl. Just wanted to let you know we’re having a party tonight.
And then If you want to join.
And then ☺
Beside the word tonight, she’s put the emoji of a dancing girl in a red dress.
Then I remember: Tango class. Tonight. That’s where I will find Ava. That is where she’ll be.
I will tell her I am so sorry. I will tell her never leave me again.
10.
The tango class we go to is downtown, in a walk-up studio that looks out onto dead trees and sketch street. It’s called Tango Palace, even though all it is is a low-ceilinged room strung with mostly nonworking lights. The class is taught by a brusque, beautiful Polish woman in strappy black and a grave-looking man in a suit who always seems covered in an incongruous amount of sweat.
They bark at us when we do poorly. Put us on the spot. You! What are you doing? I don’t know, I always say, going red. But mostly I do well with shame.
The students are mainly locals as well as some engineering nerds from Warren who are using this as an opportunity to socialize. There is never any sign of the mythical Diego, which is why Ava and I keep coming back, apart from the sheer pleasure of dancing, though we are truly terrible (I am truly terrible). We dance with each other because that is better than dancing with the office types and the engineering nerds. We wait for Diego.
There’s no way she would miss tonight.
But when I arrive at the studio, there’s no sign of her. Not in the small circle of students clustered around the couple, who are already in the midst of showing us tonight’s combination. Not on the bench outside smoking, not standing in a corner plotting the social apocalypse.
The music starts and I’m about to leave because she isn’t here and I didn’t pay attention to the new move anyway. But the engineering student to my right has turned to me with an awkward
smile. I am the person to his left, am I not? I am. We dance.
I’m terrible. I can’t follow. That’s the downside of only dancing with Ava. We don’t really do the follow-lead thing, we just close our eyes and sort of go with it. I step on his feet. He is polite about it but visibly frustrated. I am apologetic, but not overly so because I am distracted. Where is she? Why isn’t she here?
And that’s when I see her, standing a little outside the circle of dancing pairs. Not looking at me at all. Pretending that she is actually interested in learning these moves, in observing everyone’s feet. I try to catch her eye, but it won’t be caught. When at last I see her looking at something close to my direction, I smile. But she looks past me, through me. A guy asks her to dance, and I watch her accept.
“Hey,” the man I’m dancing with says. “Ow.”
“Sorry.”
* * *
—
During break she walks out of class quickly. I follow her out there, into the dark street. Ava! At first it’s all black, but then my eyes adjust to the dark and I see her silhouette in a cloud of smoke, under the Tango Palace sign.
I run over to her. “Ava!!!”
“Hey,” she says. Smiles. Like everything is normal. Like she hasn’t been ignoring me for the past two weeks. Like it isn’t weird that we came here separately for the first time in months. Just you know, Hey. S’up.
I want to say, What the fuck? Where the hell have you been? Why did you disappear on me? But she’s looking at me so normally that all I can say is, “Hey. How have you been?”
She shrugs. “Okay. You know. Life among the dead bugs and book corpses. You?”
I look at her face through her fishnet veil. Is she pissed? I can’t tell because it’s hard to see her expression in the dark. I shrug, smile, but feel my lip jerk to one side.
“Okay. Stressful. School and all.”
She nods at the moon, who would never be stressed out by dumb things like school. I wish she would look at me.