Use Me

by Elissa Schappell

  I get up from the table. I can’t look at Mary Beth, even though I know it is the last time I will ever see her. I want to hold my son. I want my baby.

  Outside, Ondine is on her knees pulling weeds from around the stoop. She has straightened up the hallway, lining up the buckets of chalk, jars of bubbles and umbrellas, centering the doormat. She has wisely removed her tiara and left it by the door.

  “Where’s Charlie?” I scan the bushes where he sometimes likes to hide. I see her boa and some beach towels, which we put on the steps when we want to sit outside in the evenings, spread over the bushes.

  “He was right t’ere,” Ondine says, gesturing with her sunglasses to the steps. “But he left, you know. He was so bored.”

  Mary Beth stands behind me in the foyer. She lights a cigarette, and she exhales loudly.

  “What do you mean, he left?”

  “Oh, he went adios, bon voyage, adieu.” Ondine throws kisses, waving her arms as if she were bidding farewell to an ocean liner.

  “Some stranger came by, don’t you know,” Ondine says, her voice trailing off. I swear, she thinks it’s a joke. There’s no one on the block, the street is completely empty, except for the trash barrels and cardboard boxes that the neighbors have put out for the morning pickup.

  I take the stairs two at a time. I rip the towels off the bushes, half expecting Charlie to jump out and scare me, but he doesn’t.

  “He left?” I ask Ondine again. “Are you sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure.”

  Immediately I start to compose a police description: Elvis T-shirt, green shorts, red high-tops, side part, blond hair. Three years old. Blue eyes, blue blue eyes. He’s beautiful. First my father and now Charlie.

  No, I think, my father, the angel, came and got Charlie. That’s it. He’ll protect him.

  Bullshit.

  Charlie is not a wanderer, he doesn’t slip off. He’s here. He wouldn’t leave me. Something horrible has happened. I was out there on the goddamned porch with that woman and now my boy is missing. It isn’t possible. My breasts ache.

  “What are you saying?” Mary Beth asks Ondine, sounding for the first time, to me, like a real mother.

  “Oh, can’t you see I’m a-working here,” Ondine sings.

  “Stop it,” Mary Beth shouts.

  Ondine’s lower lip begins to tremble. I head back up the stairs to call the police, to call Billy. He’ll know what to do, when I notice a large cardboard box out on the curb beginning to move. I am sure I am hallucinating, willing it to move, and then, in a flash, my boy leaps out, screaming and waving his arms. His fluffy blond hair stands up as if he and Ondine have been wrestling. He dashes through the gate and leaps onto Ondine, who bursts out laughing, and the two of them giggle uproariously, hugging each other and jumping up and down.

  I feel tricked and stupid. In three bounds I have my son by the back of the neck.

  “Not funny, Charlie.” He squinches up his shoulders and starts to whimper. I’ve never done that before, grabbed him like that. Like I wanted to hurt him. I shake him hard. His feet fly out in front of him. Then I pull him into my lap. My whole body is shaking.

  He yelps.

  All at once I feel terrible. I am terrible.

  “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry, baby, but you scared Mommy. I was afraid I’d lost you, I was afraid something terrible had happened to you,” I say, stroking his hair, kissing his temples, his eyes. I can barely breathe.

  I glare at Mary Beth, her and her disreputable strumpet of a daughter. “You can call a car inside,” I say.

  “Ev,” Mary Beth says, then sighs. “Shit,” she says. “Ondine, I believe it goes without saying that you shall have no Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty videos for the rest of the week,” she says, grabbing her daughter by the arm and pulling her inside, but I don’t believe her, she’s got no backbone. I want her gone, I don’t want any more memories of her. I just want her out, vanished, gone.

  She reappears a few minutes later, she’s still got Ondine by the wrist. “We’re going to go now.”

  I stand up, it feels so formal.

  Ondine’s crown is crooked, her bottom lip thrust out in a pout. “I didn’t get to the linen closet,” she says apologetically.

  “All right then,” Mary Beth says. She gathers Ondine to her side and checks up the street for their taxi. Neither of us knows what to do.

  “You know what, we’ll take the train,” she says, and the two of them start to walk away.

  It’s too much leaving, too much.

  “Don’t go,” I say, surprising both of us. I reach down and pick Charlie up off the step. “Just one more thing.” Mary Beth knew my father, she knew something I didn’t know, something I wanted.

  “I really don’t think—” she starts to say.

  “Please,” I say.

  Mary Beth sighs, then she says, “Until the car comes, and you have to make me a drink, and not a weak one this time. A real drink.”

  I hold open the door, and she enters tentatively. She sits on the sofa, at the far end where there’s some shade, and stares down at the floor. Ondine climbs up and curls up beside her, resting her head on her mother’s knee.

  I sit across from them in my old velvet armchair, the chair I’ve nursed both my children in. Charlie is in my lap, slumped against me.

  “There’s something I need to ask you, something I want you to tell me,” I say, my voice nearly a whisper. I’m glad she’s not looking at me. It almost hurts to talk. “Do you think I loved him too much?”

  Mary Beth stiffens, and for a moment I’m sure she’s not going to answer me, then she looks up at me, fixing me with a terrible stare. “I wouldn’t know.”

  Charlie and Ondine have started making faces at each other. Ondine crawls into Mary Beth’s lap and starts sucking her thumb. Mary Beth strokes her hair. I pull up my blouse and unsnap my bra; I nudge Charlie’s head toward my weeping breast. He pushes away, shaking his head.

  “No,” he says. “I want to dig up the hamster,” he says, kicking his legs, struggling to get loose. “I want to show her Archie.”

  “No.” I hold him fast in my arms. I won’t let go. He gives up and goes limp.

  “Mom,” he says. “Am I going to die?”

  “You mean right now, right this instant?”

  “I am, right?” Charlie says. He is serious.

  I don’t say anything for a moment.

  “Yes,” I say, “but not for a very, very long time.”

  “So when I’m old you’re going to die?”

  I don’t say anything. Then, “Yes. When you’re old. I hope so.”

  Charlie starts to cry. I don’t want to cry in front of him. I push his head toward my breast.

  “Here,” I say. Here is comfort, take it.

  He refuses, turning his head away.

  “Oh, honey, it will make it better,” I say, but it’s not true. The truth is, I’ll feel better.

  He struggles to climb out of my lap, but I don’t let him. I won’t let him. He turns around in my lap and faces me, frowning. “Charlie.” I say his name like I’m begging him to stay.

  “Listen,” he says. He sounds like my father. Then he drops his head on my shoulder and sighs.

  I close my eyes for a moment, and there he is. My father. The sight of him in motion takes my breath. He’s still in his blue jeans and red workshirt, but now he appears to be holding an imaginary microphone in his left hand, his right hand stretches out toward me, toward an imaginary sea of people. He’s singing, Wild, wild horses, couldn’t drag me away….

  “Let me go,” Charlie says. “Let me go.”

  What can I do?

  I let go.

  Acknowledgments

  My greatest thanks to my editor Rob Weisbach, without whom this book would not have been possible. For their guidance, enduring generosity, and inspiration I am eternally indebted to Helen Schulman, Eddie Villepique, Michael Hainey, Elizabeth Gaffney, Jennifer Gilmore, Rachel Urquhart, and Aimée B
ell. I am also grateful for the advice and encouragement of Joy Harris, Leslie Daniels, Dr. Judith Brisman, Betsy Sussler, Ken Foster, and Meaghan Dowling. For their abiding faith and support, Connie Schappell and Andrea DeLuca are deserving of more gratitude than I can express.

  Finally, I am in awe of the love that Rob Spillman, the last man standing at the weenie roast when it started to snow, has bestowed on me.

  About the Author

  Elissa Schappell writes the “Hot Type” column for Vanity Fair and is a founding editor of the literary magazine Tin House. She received her M.F.A. from the Creative Writing Program at New York University. She has been a senior editor at The Paris Review, and has contributed to numerous magazines including GQ, Vogue, Bomb, Bookforum, and Spin. She lives in Brooklyn.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  More Praise for Elissa Schappell’s Use Me

  “Elissa Schappell has a wonderful eye and ear, she’s smart as hell, and she’s got the nerve to caper on that edge where you can’t quite tell the appalling from the sidesplitting. These astringent family romances broke my heart so entertainingly that only looking back did I see what dark places she’d danced me through.”

  —David Gates, author of Preston Falls

  “It’s the rock-hard honesty beneath the gem-bright hilarity that make this a debut collection to savor.”

  —Elle

  “Striking…. Darkly humorous…Schappell evokes Evie’s most vulnerable and shameful thoughts with fearlessness and lyrical precision.”

  —Village Voice

  “Elissa Schappell’s take on grief, desire, death and dying, and her inappropriate fixations on kissing teenage boys and fathers, oh yeah, and nuns…is original and funny, and winning. Sometimes, too, it’s painful, as all great literature should be. She’s a challenge and a star.”

  —Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm

  “Beautifully written…Schappell writes from her heart and soul.”

  —Washington Post

  “Lively without ever stumbling over its own cleverness, funny without being smart-alecky, Use Me is a story about growing up that’s written for grownups.”

  —Salon

  “She is just so good. All the others can go home. She can stay.”

  —Fay Weldon, author of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil

  “A gem of a laugh-and-cry-out-loud novel….As a paean to a father, it just feels right.”

  —Mirabella

  “An impressive debut novel…Schappell layers Evie’s story poetically…[and] renders Evie’s grief with surprising eloquence and subtle humor.”

  —US magazine

  “These linked stories share an extremely appealing voice—mordant, passionate, vulnerable, sly—a voice that sounds lived.”

  —Amy Hempel, author of Tumble Home

  “Witty and poignant.”

  —Mademoiselle

  “Will make you laugh out loud and puddle up, too. What more can you ask?”

  —Seattle Times

  “I like to laugh, and this book yanked me into a million different emotional upheavals, and I loved every minute of it.”

  —Jane

  “Use Me is about girls, boys, moms, dads, friends, enemies, sex, living, dying, and everything in between. It is hilarious and touching.”

  —Whitney Otto, author of How to Make an American Quilt

  “Dazzling fiction…. Gorgeous.”

  —Time Out

  “What makes these stories so disturbing and memorable is Schappell’s powerful portrait of how even good love can sometimes be accompanied by a destructive undertow.”

  —Toronto Star

  “A seriously good novel. It takes romance, relationships, religion, death and fathers as lightly and as seriously as any smart, sane person you know.”

  —Baltimore Sun

  “What’s most startling about Elissa Schappell’s brilliant debut is not the impressive elegance of her prose, nor the frightening acuity of her observations, but the exhilarating humor she employs when exposing the shameful secrets that fuel both love and grief.”

  —Helen Schulman, author of The Revisionist

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  USE ME. Copyright © 2000 by Elissa Schappell. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © JUNE 2007 ISBN: 9780061882166

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