“Well, they’ve got her on a forty-eight-hour hold. So . . .” Cora shrugged. “I guess at least she’s detoxing right now. And maybe she’ll have a shelter bed by the time she’s out.”
Yvonne looked down. “I don’t know how you do it,” she murmured. “Every single day. How you don’t lose hope.”
Cora surprised herself by saying, “Oh, I do. I just pretend that I don’t.”
Yvonne looked up, staring at her sharply, and Cora had a peculiar sensation of loosening, uncurling, and pushing off with a fortifying heedlessness that was liberating and bleak. If she still drank, she would have taken a gulp of wine at that moment. In her mind she saw money, coins and coins of it, running through her fingers.
“May I ask you a question?” Yvonne said.
Cora nodded.
“Why did you leave home?”
Cora had told the story of her downward spiral in front of countless donors. After years of twelve-step testimony she could easily slide into the instructive, talking-points tone this spiel seemed to demand. She always began with a disclaimer: My parents weren’t abusive. Which makes me different from most runaways. Measured, wide-eyed, absolving everyone of everything. I made a choice. And she opened her mouth to say it again and found that she couldn’t.
What she heard herself saying instead was “I was in love with an older guy, and I wanted to have sex with him.”
Yvonne’s fingers closed around the stem of her wineglass. She frowned.
“And that’s why you left home?”
“Pretty much,” Cora said. “My parents didn’t let me date. They were really, really afraid I’d turn into a slut. I mean, preoccupied with the possibility I’d turn into a slut. As in, every rule they made revolved around protecting me from that fate. And, um, I wanted to have sex. So.”
Yvonne looked grave and slightly stricken.
Cora kept going. “And this guy got me into drugs, and then he overdosed and I just went crazy. I kind of wanted to die with him. And I think it was mourning, the whole time I was on the street like that. I could say to you that I was a bad, bad girl and experimenting and rebelling, or whatever, but I really do think it was my way of mourning. And I could say there was one big, defining experience that changed me and made it okay, but there wasn’t. It’s still not okay. It’ll never be okay. I just eventually stopped mourning.”
Yvonne said, “But you got off the drugs. You made a life for yourself.”
“The other thing was a life too.”
Yvonne looked dismayed. “But what kind of life? Strung out, on the streets? Addicted to drugs?” Her voice trailed off, and she toyed with her fork.
Cora laughed, meanly. She was suddenly very angry. She had been waiting, she realized, for this chance since the moment they had met. Since before.
“Believe me,” she said. Her voice was deliberate and low, feeling its way. “No one would do drugs if they weren’t fun. The drugs are what I miss the most.”
She laughed again, this time with disbelief at having said it out loud. But it was true.
Yvonne gracefully nudged her glass aside and cradled her chin in one long-fingered hand.
“I wouldn’t really know,” she said evenly.
Cora blurted out, “I was with your daughter at Ravenswood.”
Yvonne stared.
“I don’t know how long she was there. I was only there for a month. That’s the way it worked, you know, if your parents couldn’t afford to keep paying, they’d get told you were cured. And if your parents were rich enough, you were never cured.”
In the dimness Yvonne’s face seemed to tighten into facets, like a diamond, each outraged angle giving off light. And Cora kept going. She couldn’t stop.
“That place was, excuse me, a mind fuck. They made up a diagnosis and made you try to fit it. Which may have been what they did to Angelica. Who I only saw once or twice, because I was stuck in a tiny padded room, alone, most of the time.”
Her voice was unrecognizable to her ears: ragged, lashing, corrosive. Almost breaking. When she yelled at City Hall, it was mostly a put-on: she was angry, but she also knew she had to seem sane, galvanizing, in the right. Now she was simply ranting. Ranting at the millionaire who had invited her to dinner. And she couldn’t stop.
“I was a junkie when I went in there,” she said. “Like your daughter. And as soon as I got out, I couldn’t wait to go do some drugs. I felt lucky to be out of that place and doing drugs again.”
She was out of breath. For years she had counseled parents, engineered reconciliations, built bridges for girls to reconnect with their estranged families. Even if those families had made terrible mistakes, like sending their daughters to offshore boot camps, beating them, disowning them for getting raped or pregnant. No matter how awful the parents had been, they clung to Cora; they called her and told her how much they loved their daughters. They said things like, “You don’t have to tell me where she is; just tell her that I love her.” They cried. They listened to her with the chastened raptness of converts. They did what she suggested. And if their daughters came back or pulled themselves clear and forgave their parents, Cora thanked God she’d been patient, bitten her tongue, refused to say the very things she was now saying to Yvonne Borneo.
Yvonne picked up her napkin.
“Let me stop you right there, please, Cora,” she said. Her voice was calm.
“I still—”
“Please,” Yvonne said. “Please.”
She waited until Cora became uncomfortable enough with the silence to sit back, with poor grace, and say, “All right.”
“I think,” Yvonne said, “I wanted to meet you because I knew something about your past. I knew you were a runaway. And on some level I wanted to see you and find out about you. I wanted to find out why you survived and my daughter didn’t.”
She folded her hands and cleared her throat, and when she resumed speaking her voice slackened, sagging with the dead weight of futile certainty. “It’s because she was schizophrenic, that’s what you’d tell me. And maybe you’d be right. But let me ask you this. If the situations were reversed, if you had been the one to die, and if Angelica were sitting in front of your parents right now and saying how awful Ravenswood was, what a mistake they made, what would your parents tell her?”
Cora’s mouth was parched. The bitten shreds of her lips stuck together when she tried to separate them.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Yvonne’s mouth stretched into a desolate smile.
“I’ll tell you,” she said. “They’d say exactly what I’m about to. They’d say, ‘My daughter was an ocean underneath an ocean.’ And it would be true. I see these girls on the streets, girls like DJ, the girls in your drop-in, and I know every single one of them is someone’s daughter. And to their own parents, every single one of them is an ocean underneath an ocean.” She tapped her index finger on the table in rhythm with the words. “Fathoms and fathoms deep. A complete mystery. My daughter is completely unfathomable to me. And certainly, if I may say so, to you.”
Cora balled her fists under the table. She knew she should be mollified—if this were a TV show, she would be cowed before the unassailable authority of maternal privilege—but she was furious, burning, convinced that nothing had ever made her angrier than this: this artful abdication of responsibility, this consigning of every lost daughter to a communal slag heap of pretty Persephones. She remembered her father’s voice on the phone, telling her, “You can’t make amends for something that never happened.” How matter-of-factly he had absolved her of everything. How she wished she could accept his words as a gift and pretend they didn’t feel like a swift and brutal erasure of her entire adolescence as though it were some wartime atrocity, a stack of bodies to be buried and sprinkled with lime. He had excised a part of her and left it on the cutting-room floor. And when he reminisced about her growing up, as he occasionally did on her birthday and when he’d been drinking late at night and watching sentimental films on American Movie C
lassics, he selectively focused on those childhood behaviors that predicted and explained Cora’s choice of career. How she’d always had a charitable bent. Defended smaller children from bullies. Brought home injured baby birds. Cried when starving Ethiopians were on the news. A Florence Nightingale whitewash, obscuring the simple fact that she cared about homeless junkie underage prostitutes because she used to be one. She knew what it was like to be Angelica in a way Yvonne Borneo could never know.
“My parents,” she said, “would never say that. Because I am not the same person as your daughter. I don’t look at what happened to Angelica and think there but for the grace of God go I. We’re all different. We’re all different people!”
She was sputtering now, losing her eloquence, letting herself go in a way she never had before, and in her mind she saw the drop-in shuttered, saw herself somewhere else, working in an art store, maybe, or walking the streets of a strange city, or telling an entirely new subset of people what she used to be and what it meant, giving it a new spin, all the dead and dying girls of the Mission as distant and abstract to her as Bosnian war orphans, as famine victims, far away and someone else’s problem, and she remembered how, at the moment the phone rang in her apartment the night before, there was a panicked, nonsensical moment in which she thought, she knew, it was Angelica. It was Angelica, calling to tell her something about her mother. To say be gentle with her, because she’s in pain. Every moment of the day she’s in pain. And Cora lifted her eyes from her plate and said, “You’re not going to give me any money, are you?” When her voice shook, she didn’t know if it was with despair or relief.
Honey, you are never getting out of here.
She was dimly aware of the thin and careful form of Yvonne Borneo getting up from her chair and walking around the table. Then there was a hand on her shoulder—experimental, inquisitive, in the manner of a cat testing its balance on some unfamiliar surface.
Cora peered through her fingers. The novelist’s face was inches from her own. Her brown eyes were very still and steady. Cora knew she was being shown something, that Yvonne was allowing some skimmed-away sediment to settle and collect in her dark eyes, in the grooves of her face, in the curves of her mouth. The look she gave Cora conveyed neither reproach nor remorse. What did it convey? Cora would never really know. She could only register something old and muddied and orphaned between them, a helpless moat of transference, brimming with the run-off of two people whose primary identities were, in the eyes of each other, not that of philanthropist and beneficiary, or writer and caregiver, but of someone else’s mother and someone else’s child. And it was this—this ancient ooze of crossed signals, this morass of things unsaid—that made Cora lower her forehead to Yvonne’s shoulder and whisper, “She loved you. I could tell that she loved you,” as the novelist stroked her hair the way Cora once imagined her stroking the head of a fox stole, automatically, with the phantom tenderness of a hand toward an object that is not the right thing at all, but is soft at least, and warm.
GEORGE SAUNDERS
The Semplica-Girl Diaries
FROM The New Yorker
September 3rd
HAVING JUST TURNED forty, have resolved to embark on grand project of writing every day in this new black book just got at OfficeMax. Exciting to think how in one year, at rate of one page/day, will have written three hundred and sixty-five pages, and what a picture of life and times then available for kids & grandkids, even great-grandkids, whoever, all are welcome (!) to see how life really was/is now. Because what do we know of other times really? How clothes smelled and carriages sounded? Will future people know, for example, about sound of airplanes going over at night, since airplanes by that time passé? Will future people know sometimes cats fought in night? Because by that time some chemical invented to make cats not fight? Last night dreamed of two demons having sex and found it was only two cats fighting outside window. Will future people be aware of concept of “demons”? Will they find our belief in “demons” quaint? Will “windows” even exist? Interesting to future generations that even sophisticated college grad like me sometimes woke in cold sweat, thinking of demons, believing one possibly under bed? Anyway, what the heck, am not planning on writing encyclopedia, if any future person is reading this, if you want to know what a “demon” was, go look it up, in something called an encyclopedia, if you even still have those!
Am getting off track, due to tired, due to those fighting cats.
Hereby resolve to write in this book at least twenty minutes a night, no matter how tired. (If discouraged, just think how much will have been recorded for posterity after one mere year!)
September 5th
Oops. Missed a day. Things hectic. Will summarize yesterday. Yesterday a bit rough. While picking kids up at school, bumper fell off Park Avenue. Note to future generations: Park Avenue = type of car. Ours not new. Ours oldish. Bit rusty. Kids got in, Eva (middle child) asked what was meaning of “junkorama.” At that moment, bumper fell off. Mr. Renn, history teacher, quite helpful, retrieved bumper (note: write letter of commendation to principal), saying he too once had car whose bumper fell off, when poor, in college. Eva assured me it was all right bumper had fallen off. I replied of course it was all right, why wouldn’t it be all right, it was just something that had happened, I certainly hadn’t caused. Image that stays in mind is of three sweet kids in backseat, chastened expressions on little faces, timidly holding bumper across laps. One end of bumper had to hang out Eva’s window and today she has sniffles, plus small cut on hand from place where bumper was sharp.
Lilly (oldest, nearly thirteen!), as always, put all in perspective, by saying, Who cares about stupid bumper, we’re going to get a new car soon anyway, when rich, right?
Upon arriving home, put bumper in garage. In garage, found dead large mouse or small squirrel crawling with maggots. Used shovel to transfer majority of squirrel/mouse to Hefty bag. Smudge of squirrel/mouse still on garage floor, like oil stain w/embedded fur tufts.
Stood looking up at house, sad. Thought: Why sad? Don’t be sad. If sad, will make everyone sad. Went in happy, not mentioning bumper, squirrel/mouse smudge, maggots, then gave Eva extra ice cream, due to I had spoken harshly to her.
Have to do better! Be kinder. Start now. Soon they will be grown and how sad, if only memory of you is testy, stressed guy in bad car.
When will I have sufficient leisure/wealth to sit on hay bale watching moon rise, while in luxurious mansion family sleeps? At that time, will have chance to reflect deeply on meaning of life, etc., etc. Have a feeling and have always had a feeling that this and other good things will happen for us!
September 6th
Very depressing birthday party today at home of Lilly’s friend Leslie Torrini.
House is mansion where Lafayette once stayed. Torrinis showed us Lafayette’s room: now their “Fun Den.” Plasma TV, pinball game, foot massager. Thirty acres, six garages (they call them “outbuildings”): one for Ferraris (three), one for Porsches (two, plus one he is rebuilding), one for historical merry-go-round they are restoring as family (!). Across trout-stocked stream, red Oriental bridge flown in from China. Showed us hoofmark from some dynasty. In front room, near Steinway, plaster cast of hoofmark from even earlier dynasty, in wood of different bridge. Picasso autograph, Disney autograph, dress Greta Garbo once wore, all displayed in massive mahogany cabinet.
Vegetable garden tended by guy named Karl.
Lilly: Wow, this garden is like ten times bigger than our whole yard.
Flower garden tended by separate guy, weirdly also named Karl.
Lilly: Wouldn’t you love to live here?
Me: Lilly, ha-ha, don’t ah . . .
Pam (my wife, very sweet, love of life!): What, what is she saying wrong? Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you love to live here? I know I would.
In front of house, on sweeping lawn, largest SG arrangement ever seen, all in white, white smocks blowing in breeze, and Lilly says, Can we go closer?
&
nbsp; Leslie Torrini: We can but we don’t, usually.
Leslie’s mother, dressed in Indonesian sarong: We don’t, as we already have, many times, dear, but you perhaps would like to? Perhaps this is all very new and exciting to you?
Lilly, shyly: It is, yes.
Leslie’s mom: Please, go, enjoy.
Lilly races away.
Leslie’s mom, to Eva: And you, dear?
Eva stands timidly against my leg, shakes head no.
Just then father (Emmett) appears, says time for dinner, hopes we like sailfish flown in fresh from Guatemala, prepared with a rare spice found only in one tiny region of Burma, which had to be bribed out.
The kids can eat later, in the tree house, Leslie’s mom says.
She indicates the tree house, which is painted Victorian and has a gabled roof and a telescope sticking out and what looks like a small solar panel.
Thomas: Wow, that tree house is like twice the size of our actual house.
(Thomas, as usual, exaggerating: tree house is more like one-third size of our house. Still, yes: big tree house.)
Our gift not the very worst. Although possibly the least expensive—someone brought a mini DVD player; someone brought a lock of hair from an actual mummy (!)—it was, in my opinion, the most heartfelt. Because Leslie (who appeared disappointed by the lock of mummy hair, and said so, because she already had one (!)) was, it seemed to me, touched by the simplicity of our paper-doll set. And although we did not view it as kitsch at the time we bought it, when Leslie’s mom said, Les, check it out, kitsch or what, don’t you love it?, I thought, Yes, well, maybe it is kitsch, maybe we did intend. In any event, this eased the blow when the next gift was a ticket to the Preakness (!), as Leslie has recently become interested in horses, and has begun getting up early to feed their nine horses, whereas previously she had categorically refused to feed the six llamas.
The Best American Short Stories 2013 Page 28