by Dan Chaon
——
Carla was not the first girl he kissed. The first girl was actually Carla’s friend Chrissy, the permanently tanned blond girl, with her dusky arms and pale, lotioned palms. “She was disgusting,” Carla said years later, when he told her about it. She didn’t remember her times at Bruce and Michelle’s as fondly as he did. “God!” Carla said. “How gross! I always knew there was something really wrong with her. She was just the kind of person who would try to seduce a ten-year-old.”
And Troy had nodded—he was always convinced by Carla’s vehement dislikes, even later, when he became one of them.
But the truth was somewhat more complicated than that, he thought; more than simple words like disgusting and seduce, though he didn’t know what terms would be better to substitute.
It was all mixed up in his mind, twined up with his memories of that time in his life, with his love for Bruce and Michelle’s place, with the history of his life with Carla, with the fact that Chrissy wasn’t alive anymore.
It was a lot to process, he thought.
And to be honest, he didn’t know what was really going on that day, or how it had come to be that Chrissy kissed him. A year had passed since they first encountered each other, and Troy was now eleven, almost twelve. It was the spring of 1978. He had been spending most of his after-school time at Bruce and Michelle’s by that point, sometimes sleeping over on a Friday or Saturday night in a sleeping bag on the floor of Ray’s room, falling asleep to the comfortable sounds of laughter and loud talking and partying, and then waking up to the dead silence of aftermath, the door to Bruce and Michelle’s sealed tight, a blanket draped over a curtain rod to block the light from entering their room, a straggler or two asleep on the couch or curled up on the rug in front of the fish tank, beer cans stacked on the surfaces and the gray smell of stale smoke lingering in the air.
On that morning he’d wandered into the kitchen around six o’clock in the morning, hungry because he’d forgotten to eat the night before. Chrissy was sitting there at the counter, and at first he thought she was asleep. She had her head down, cradled in the crook of her elbow, and she didn’t move when he got some sweetened cereal out of the cupboard and poured it into a bowl. But when he returned from the refrigerator with a carton of milk, she had raised her head.
“Hungry?” she said brightly, and he held himself still, wary. The pupils of her eyes were enormously dilated, so that the gray-green of the irises were almost swallowed up, a thin aura like the rind of sun around an eclipse. Her mascara was smudged: raccoon eyes, he had heard the other girls call it. But she was looking at him expectantly, and so he nodded. Yes, I’m hungry. A few strands of hair adhered to the sticky gloss on her lip, and she used the edge of her pinkie fingernail to dislodge them.
“I’ll bet I look like shit,” she said, in a musing, almost contented voice, and Troy wasn’t sure whether she was addressing herself or him. He shifted as she lit a cigarette. She glanced him over lightly, then turned away to blow a line of smoke into the air above their heads.
“Oh, come on, Troy,” she said after a moment. “You should know this. When the girl says, ‘I look like shit,’ the boy is supposed to say, ‘No, you look great!’ That’s the way it works.”
“Oh,” he said, and fingered his spoon. The smeared makeup made her eyes inscrutable, and he couldn’t gauge her expression. “You look great,” he said softly.
“You lie,” she said. She smiled secretively, then let forth another stream of smoke, her lips puckered like a child blowing soap bubbles. “You’ve got to be a better liar if you’re ever going to get a girl to kiss you.”
“Yeah, right,” he said, and frowned. This was a game that people sometimes liked to play with children—“How many girlfriends do you have?” they would ask, or “I’ll bet those little girls chase you all around the playground!”—and he didn’t have much patience with this kind of teasing. He turned his attention to his cereal, sinking his spoon into the soup of milk and floating apple-flavored O’s intently, ignoring her, expecting her to lose interest and move on to another room.
Around them, the trailer was silent. He could hear the hum of the fish tank’s bubbler, the insistent awakening chirp of sparrows nested in the eaves and awnings of the trailers, or in the trailer court’s single cottonwood tree. He made a slurping sound when he brought his spoon to his lips, just to annoy the quiet, and noticed that Chrissy was still observing him expectantly.
“Can I have a bite of your cereal?” she said at last.
He shrugged. “Okay,” he said, but when he started to push the bowl toward her, she did something unnerving. She pushed her hair behind her ears and leaned forward, closing her eyes lightly and opening her mouth. She wanted him to feed her.
It was weird, he thought, and he hesitated. But she sat there with her mouth open, and after a moment he held his spoon out. He watched as she slowly closed her lips over it. Her eyes opened as she swallowed.
“Mmmm,” she said. “That tastes good. Thanks.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. He set the spoon back on the counter, not sure what to do with it now that it had been inside her mouth. He had seen the inside of her lips, which were slick and pink and glistening. And her tongue. He wasn’t sure what to think about it.
But she didn’t act as if anything unusual had happened. He watched as she lifted her cigarette, blowing on the tip of it so that the ember glowed orange through the gray crust of ash. Then she stubbed it out. She smiled.
“Can I ask you a question?” she said. He just shrugged. Her attention was not particularly welcome, but it was also hypnotic in a way he didn’t quite understand.
“I heard from Bruce that you’re adopted,” she said. “Are you?”
“Yeah,” he said. “So?”
“So nothing,” she said. “It’s just that I was adopted, too, so I thought that was interesting. I mean, you don’t meet many other people who are adopted, do you?”
“I guess not.”
“You guess not,” she repeated. She regarded him steadily for a moment, her expression hooded. Then she smiled. “You’re funny,” she said. Then: “So what do you think about it? About being adopted?”
“I don’t know,” he said. The truth was, he didn’t think about it very much, and certainly never talked about it. He’d always regarded this fact about himself as both unimportant and private, like people’s belly buttons. He was adopted. We adopted each other, his mother had told him. God brought us right to you and put us together as a family. He’d known this from an early age, and he’d been taught that it didn’t matter at all, that he was no different from anyone else. His parents—Earl and Dorothy Timmens—were just as real as anyone else’s parents. But still, it bothered him that Bruce had told this girl about it, and he felt uncomfortable imagining the two of them discussing him. He shrugged, eyeing her suspiciously. “It’s not a big deal,” he said. “Nobody cares about it.”
“Huh,” she said: a short laugh. “Oh, sure they do. You just don’t know it yet.” She made a wry face, her eyes glancing sideways slyly, as if someone might be listening, and she was going to tell him something secret, or dirty. “Don’t you think about it? Don’t you wonder about your mother?”
“Not really,” he said. And what else could he say? He looked down, thoughtfully, tracing the fake wood-grain patterns of the counter’s Formica surface. What could he tell her? Could he say that he’d always believed his mother when she told him that he was special—chosen, selected, his mother said. When he was little, he used to listen to a record “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?” He would play it over and over, and in some ways he supposed that he’d always thought his adoption was something like that—that his parents had wandered through a corridor of glass cases containing babies, and that they’d suddenly halted, struck with certainty, in front of a bassinet that contained his infant self. They’d pointed, and a nurse had brought him bundled in a blanket into their arms, a clean and uncomplicated transaction. He’d
never much considered what came before that. He knew about sex, about how babies were born, but the idea of being inside someone’s stomach—of being expelled wetly from some woman’s body—seemed grotesque and unreal. In his mind, that person was like a skin he’d shed, a cocoon husk he’d left behind.
“I guess,” he said, “I guess I always figured that it wasn’t very important.” And he shrugged, shifting uncertainly. He was aware of the inexplicable and almost oppressive heaviness of her attention. It was an ability some girls had, he recognized, a power they could draw upon simply by focusing themselves on a single person. His skin prickled as she leaned closer, as her forearm brushed lightly against his and he could see the pale hairs just above her wrist, the rosy smell of lotion and moist, soft pressure of skin brushing against skin, the way her hair grazed his shoulder.
“Oh, well,” she said. She let the pad of her forefinger touch the back of his hand, briefly, smiling at him in a way that wasn’t really a smile at all, but something else—a swallowed sadness, a shudder. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I’m just weird. I’m, like, probably sort of crazy or something. But . . . I think about it a lot. I think, you know, what is she doing now? Like, maybe she’s a singer or a famous actress or something. And what does she look like? And what would have happened if she’d kept me? Do you know what I’m talking about? You could have had this whole other different life, and maybe you’d be different, and, well, happier. I mean, I know that I don’t belong in the family I’m living in now, that’s for sure.” She made a face. “Maybe I’m the only one, I don’t know. But do you really think your parents wanted to adopt a baby? Don’t you think that if they’d had the choice they would have had a real baby? I mean, one of their own.”
He didn’t know what to say to this, and so he was silent. From the next room came the sound of thick male coughing, a throat cleared of phlegm. “Fuck,” a sleepy voice muttered sharply, and her eyes shifted toward the sound.
“I feel sorry for you,” she said. “You’re a kid. You shouldn’t be hanging out in a place like this.”
And then, without warning, she kissed him. She tilted her head and pressed her lips against his. He felt her tongue move softly, a little flick along the line of his mouth, and he jerked with surprise. Her hands held his cheeks, and her lips moved against his for a moment before she released him.
“There,” she said. “Now you’ll remember me.”
——
It was about 7:30 in the morning, Saturday, as he walked home, and he could still taste the dark, smoky pressure of her tongue as he hurried through the underpass with its walls of wet, dripping, rust-stained cement, past the little abandoned grocery store with its windows pasted over with newspaper, past the grade school, toward the rows of small houses that made up the street he lived on. As he walked down Deadwood Avenue, a dog barked at him from behind a fence, and a pickup carrying a thin, ancient man in a cowboy hat pulled slowly by on the street. It had been a dry spring, and the yards of the houses were yellow-green, the tired-looking color of the sod that covered the prairie hills on the outskirts of town. St. Bonaventure was little more than a cluster of houses and stores in the middle of a dry plain of wheat fields, asphalt roads, bare, rocky hills. He didn’t think of this often, but he was aware of it at that moment—the great expanse of the world beyond the borders, the woman, the mother he’d once been inside of, out there somewhere. His stomach felt fluttery, and he felt infected by the sadness that Chrissy had given to him with her long, slow look, with the weight of her mouth against his. His heart was still light and quick and hollow in its beating.
Here was his house. Curtains drawn. The screen door with its aluminum curlicue molding.
Inside, his father was asleep on the couch. His parents had been fighting again, and his dad was huddled there under an afghan, curled up, one pale bare foot uncovered, his face severe and drawn and pressed against the arm of the couch, frowning in his dreams. His hair stood up in stiff tufts, and his eyes shifted underneath their lids as Troy tucked the blanket over his exposed foot.
He loved his father. That was what he should have told Chrissy. He loved his mother, who was still asleep in the bedroom. He loved Bruce and Michelle and Ray, all his people, his family. He didn’t want another life.
3
January 6, 1966
At the home for unwed mothers, Nora still holds out hope that the baby will stop growing, that it will die. Around her, the stomachs of the girls are swelling, becoming taut, and their souls are deflating. There is a smell of old fruit and eucalyptus, there is a large box television playing a game show, “What’s My Line,” a dozen expressionless girls staring at the screen, some of them smoking cigarettes or biting on their nails or clasping their hands in their laps. One of them is knitting. Knitting. This girl’s hands move steadily and the skein of blanket or sweater or shawl is slowly, line by line, becoming a cloth that shrouds the lump of her belly. Nora wants to kill this girl, whose face is as blank as a rabbit’s. Or she wants to kill the happy celebrities that the girl is watching as they tell their jokes. Or she wants to kill herself.
She moves along the hallway, walking, creeping, one hand cupped beneath her belly, the other on the wall. She isn’t even showing yet, but still she holds her stomach uncertainly. There is a tickling feeling, like a spider spinning a web inside her, maybe she’s only imagining it. The walls are cold, warty plaster, painted smooth, and she runs her hands across them as if they are braille, supporting herself as she goes. Doors lined up. She suspects that the rooms are all identical, though she hasn’t seen anyone else’s. She knows: a single bed, a night table with a lamp and a Bible, a desk with empty drawers, a closet with identical cheap poly-cotton maternity smocks on hangers, a window with a bare, snowy tree in the center of it.
It is not quite a prison, not quite a hospital. A Home, they call it, in the way they call the repositories for the old and the insane “Homes.” They put her in a Home, her father had once said about a neighbor woman who had lost her mind when she got old, and now Nora herself is in such a place. Being watched over. Taken care of. You cannot lock the door to your room in such a place, and her door won’t even stay closed, she doesn’t know why. The air pressure, maybe, the wind, something—she has no way of knowing, but sometimes as she lies in the dark the door will click open like an awakened eye, a shaft of light from the hallway will fall across her face. It happens frequently enough that she has taken to leaning a chair against the doorknob when she goes to sleep.
In the dark, she can’t keep herself from thinking that it is a ghost. She doesn’t believe in ghosts, exactly, but if they did exist they would thrive in a place such as this. Girls have killed themselves here, she is sure of it. It is a deathly place. Silent. Cold. There is the kind of feeling you might have, walking alone through a park in late autumn, when a single leaf falls from a tree and twists slowly to the ground in front of you.
——
January 6, 1966. This is her fourth day of residence in the Mrs. Glass House, her fourth day of captivity, and it is beginning to sink in. There is no turning back. She should have accepted that fact a long time ago, but instead she still finds herself bargaining vaguely with her body, with God, thinking that it’s possible that a mistake has been made. The long months stretch in front of her, and already it seems that she is losing herself. There is nothing to do here but wait, months upon months tunneled in front of her: June, they said, early June most likely. She sits in a chair by the window, reading her book, The Collector by John Fowles. It is inappropriate, she knows: “A brutal tormented man and the beautiful, aristocratic young woman he has taken captive,” the back cover proclaims, and the story upsets her. I hate the way I have changed. I accept too much, the woman says, and Nora underlines this passage as small glimmering motes of snow pass by outside, as somewhere down the hall a transistor radio is playing AM love songs, the Monkees singing “I’m a Believer!” She reads: “I’m so far from everything. From normality. From ligh
t. From where I want to be.” She closes the book and sits staring at her fingers, which don’t seem like her own fingers. It is exactly the wrong book to be reading at the moment, she thinks, though on second thought, a happy book, an optimistic, escapist book would be even worse. If she’s going to read anything at all it ought to be about suffering.
——
She thinks about things that she will never tell people, ugly memories that make her wince when they enter her mind.
Once, she punched herself in the stomach as hard as she could, hoping it would dislodge.
Once, she put something inside of herself—a knitting needle, which is what she had heard they used. But what, exactly, was she supposed to catch hold of with it? She imagined a floating piece of yarn with a glob of cells and blood at the end of it. Hooking it, pulling it out.
Once, she tasted bleach, but couldn’t bring herself to drink it.
——
Have the others done such things? If so, they don’t talk about it. They don’t talk about much, these girls, as if they are all spies. Mostly, they glance at one another furtively—the scratch of silverware against plates, the sound of chewing, the television voices, the soft, private moan a girl will make when she walks down the hall. What is there to say?
“This is not a sorority,” Mrs. Bibb tells them. “Let’s keep our socializing to a minimum, shall we?” It is against the rules for girls to sit in one another’s rooms and speak privately. It is requested that the girls do not reveal the names of the towns they come from, and it is best if they avoid speaking of their pasts at all—the fathers of their babies, the mistakes that have been made, the families they’ve disappointed. It is against the rules for the girls to tell one another their last names, and she suspects that most of the first names are pseudonyms as well. Like the girl who knits, who says her name is Dominique. Dominique, like the title of the popular song from grade school, the song by the Singing Nun.