I insert the tray in the machine, clang down the door, take up a load of wet silverware from the sink so I don’t have to look at him.
Riley’s voice becomes firm. “Roll up your sleeves, Strange Girl.”
He’s very close to me now. I can smell him through the dish steam, a mixture of sweat and spice, coffee and smoke. I stay very still.
Riley looks over at the front counter, where Linus is absorbed in cleaning the pastry case. He loosens my fingers so that the silverware drifts back into the sink water. Slowly, he pushes up one sleeve of my jersey shirt, just a little at first and then all the way to my elbow. He turns my forearm over.
I sense rather than see his chest suck in, and then out, deeply. I concentrate on the dirty food that floats in the sink, soggy chunks of meat and bread, tendrils of scrambled egg, but my heart is stuttering.
Something is happening as he’s touching me, though, something confusing: an electricity, a wire being strung through my skin.
He pulls that sleeve down. He checks my other arm. His fingers are warm and gentle.
“You’ve been dark places, Strange Girl.” He tucks the folder under his arm, slides the cigarette pack from his shirt pocket. He likes to sit and smoke with the men playing Go. “I remember you saying you tried to kill yourself, but that’s just goddamn annihilation.”
I look right at him. His eyes are dark and tired. He knows something about annihilation, too, which makes me a little less ashamed of my arms, I think.
He fits the cigarette into the corner of his mouth. “But you’ve got to own your travels. You’re a big girl now. There’s no going back from that shit, you know? Buy some goddamn short sleeves and fuck the world, you know?”
Halfway to the screen door, he turns back and hands me an envelope. “Almost forgot. Your first check. You’re finally officially on payroll, no more swanky cash in pocket for you. Sorry it took Jules so long to process it. Don’t spend it all in one place, y’all.” The screen door bangs shut behind him.
After the lunch rush, I open the envelope and my heart sinks almost immediately. The amount is smaller than I counted on, because I didn’t think of the taxes. I stare at the amount taken and the amount left over, which will just barely cover my rent. And then how will I buy anything I need until the next check? It was almost better when he paid me in cash. Tanner sees me looking at the check and he nods grimly.
“Fucking sucks, doesn’t it? I’m up to my ass in loans for school, but I can’t get a second job or I wouldn’t be able to study.” He dips his head in the direction of Linus, ringing somebody up at the front counter. “She works doubles here all the time and still has to sell plasma and shit to send money to her kids. Maybe ask your parents for some help?” He expertly rolls silverware in napkins.
I fold up the paycheck without answering him. Tanner swipes at his nose. “Most everybody here is in school and gets by on loans or money from parents, except for Temple. You haven’t met her. She works nights. She’s got four jobs. This one, driving an old lady to get groceries, working a booth at a sex shop, and tutoring some kid in Spanish.”
“I was lucky enough to find this job,” I say softly.
Tanner shrugs. “Gotta do what you gotta do to get by, I guess. Roommates help, even though that can suck, too. At least I make tips.” He gathers the napkined silverware in his arms and kicks open the door to the front of the café.
In a minute, he sticks his head back in. “Go check with Linus. She can probably cash that pitiful thing for you. I’m guessing you don’t have a bank account? If you try a check cashing place, they’ll just take a slice for themselves.”
I take a long time biking home, trying to quell the panic building in me about money and rent and buying regular things and what to do. Linus did cash my check. I’ll have to pay Leonard tonight. To make myself feel better, I decide to visit a house I like where they’ve used bedsprings as trellises in a garden. The curvy bodies of green beans lace through the tendrils and coils. Beyond the bedspring trellis, the giant heads of sunflowers droop over cosmos and cactuses. Brightly painted paving stones have been looped throughout the yard, a path between the dazzling flowers, the cactuses, the glinting hubcaps suspended from cottonwoods like oversized chimes. Orange fish bob on the hazy surface of a round pond. The whole outside of the small house has been muraled with swirling clouds of color, thunderbolts, baying coyotes, lazy turtles. Sometimes when I walk by, I see a woman touching up the paint, her thick gray hair gathered at her neck. She works carefully, moving her brushes just so, a cigarette dangling in an ashtray at her feet. Once, she turned and smiled at me, a flash of white in the white-hot day, the mural a bright explosion behind her, but I hurried past her, shy. I like this house, and I like thinking about it, and that strange woman, the tidy wildness of her garden, and I want to know how to get there, to get a tiny spot on the earth, a little house to paint inside and out, a backyard to fill up and shape, how to feel comfortable in the very air around me.
It’s a bad day in the kitchen: Riley has asked me something, and that something is floating in the air between us, becoming heavier and heavier by the second.
Riley is staring at me, waiting for me to answer his question.
Riley’s fingers are the color of watery coffee. How many cigarettes has it been today? Orders have been sent back: bagels are black on one side, the scrambled tofu is missing chives, home fries are brick-hard. Two plates broken, their jagged white edges kicked beneath a stainless steel prep table.
He says he needs this to get through the shift. He says the house has a black door and a blue pickup out front. The espresso machine is whining, puffs of steam clouding Linus’s face. Tanner is cleaning the tables out front. Julie’s in her office.
“You have a break.” He takes a drag on his cigarette. His eyes are tinged with red. This morning when I came to get him, he was already up, sitting on the couch, smoking, staring at nothing, a peculiar, plasticky smell tacked to his skin. “I’m not allowed to leave during work hours. House rules.” He tries to wink, but it looks more like something’s caught in his eye.
“Please.” A hoarse echo in his throat, just like Evan when he got needy. “Your shift’s almost over anyway. I’ll pay you.”
I remember Ellis, tugging on my arm, her face frantic with need. Please, she begged. Just tell my mom I’m in the bathroom if she calls. I told her I’m staying over. Please, Charlie. I just need to be with him. Help me, Charlie, please?
He reminds me of Evan, too, when he needed a fix, just something, he’d say, to stop the motherfucking abyss threatening to eat my fucking soul, and I would steel myself, and wash up in a bathroom somewhere, enough so my face wasn’t too dirty, and stand on a corner a few blocks from Mears Park in St. Paul just after dark, waiting for a man to show up, and to lead him to the park, where Evan and Dump would be waiting.
But Ellis needed that boy, and I needed her. And Evan had helped me, saved me, so I helped him. And now Riley is asking for help. And he said he’d pay me. I need that extra money.
Casper said it would be easy to fall back into old habits, old patterns. But Casper is busy now, a million miles away. The comforting beigeness of Creeley Center is a million miles away. I feel a million miles away.
A familiar numbness comes over me as I take off my apron and lay it over the dish rack. I don’t say anything to Riley. I hold out my hand for the money and close my fingers around it. It isn’t until I’ve slid the money into my pocket that I realize I’ve forgotten my lapis lazuli stone today. My fingers fish about for it for a minute, then give up.
Outside the café, the heat sizzles the dish steam from my skin. Riley didn’t notice me hiding the knife in my pocket.
—
The man who answers the door looks me up and down and then past me, to the street, like he wants to make sure I’m alone. He’s chewing on the cap of a pen. His teeth are yellow. The house stinks of canned cat food.
Evan and Dump taught me silence is the best weapon. People
will trick you with words. They’ll twist what you say. They’ll make you think you need things you do not need. They’ll get you talking, which will relax you, and then they will attack.
The man falls back on the couch. I stay close to the door. Cats are everywhere: black-and-white, gray, tabby, milling around and mewling throatily. The coffee table in front of the man is littered with papers and cups, wrinkled magazines. “You Riley’s girl?” The pen in his mouth rolls wetly against his teeth.
“Cat got your tongue?” He points to the sea of fur moving on the raggedy carpet and laughs. “Huh, huh.” His smile dies when I stay silent.
He asks me what I’ve got.
I put the money on the table. Assess, Evan would say. Always assess before you progress. From the corner of my eye, I see a baseball bat leaning against the wall. I see dirty plates with dirty forks and knives balanced on top of the television. The television is an arm’s length away. My pocket is closer.
The man counts the money, reaches back, and raps against the wall six times.
“That’s a big-ass scar on your forehead.” He tosses the lighter back on the table, leans back into the couch as he exhales. The cigarette bobbles above his knee.
I keep my face blank. Talking is what gets you in trouble. It’s the way you get trapped.
A door opens down the hallway. A woman appears, sleepy-eyed, barefoot, her tank top sagging across her stomach. Her hair’s messy; long strands of dyed red and yellow hang in her face.
She, too, looks behind me, at the door, disappointed. The man on the couch appraises her. “Wendy, looks like your guitar guy sent a little friend instead. Should we trust her?”
Wendy drops a brown bag on the coffee table. She looks me up and down, a smile playing at her lips. “She looks harmless enough. I’m a friend of Riley’s, too,” she says to me coolly. “A very good friend.”
The man tells her to go, and I watch her swish back down the hall. The ash on his cigarette has grown. Slowly, he pushes the bag across the table with his bare toes, until it plops on the carpet. I pick it up, feeling the knife against my thigh as I bend.
“You want anything for yourself, you know where I am.”
I don’t answer, just turn and leave. I don’t stop or look back until I’m pushing through the screen door of True Grit.
Riley pulls me into the grill station, holds out his hands. He tucks the bag under his shirt. He whispers for me to cover the grill for him.
On his way to the bathroom, he motions to the refrigerator. When I open it, I see my thank-you: another bulky bag of food. I take it like a robot, no feeling, no expression, and wedge it all the way into the bottom of my backpack. Riley comes back more alert, licking his lips. He gives me a wink and goes right back to flipping potatoes on the grill.
I don’t know what to think of what I just did or why. I’ve blanked myself out, erased myself. I spend the rest of the shift in a haze.
In my room, I push my green chair against the door. I put the bag of food on the table. I slide the knife from my pocket. I don’t know how I forgot I had it.
And then just like that, all the numbness I had drops away and my heart starts beating like a crazy caged bird. Doing that for Riley, it felt good. It was wrong, but I did it, and it made me feel like I sometimes felt with Evan and Dump and what we would do: like, yes, it was bad, yes, it was wrong, but there was also an element of danger that was appealing. Like: how far could you take something before it snapped? Would you recognize the moment that something was about to go terribly, terribly wrong?
But I also realize that I’m getting really far down the ladder of Casper’s rules and all of a sudden I’m flooded with despair. I get up and pace around the room. I try the breathing exercises, but I just gasp, I can’t slow down. I’m too keyed up. Mikey said move forward and I went backward big-time and oh, fuck, here comes the tornado.
My tender kit is still wedged far back under the claw-foot tub, hidden inside Louisa’s suitcase. I don’t want that, I don’t. I run the blade of the knife lightly across my forearm, testing. My skin prickles and longing fills me up; my eyes grow wet.
I’m so close to feeling better, feeling release, right here, with this stubby little blade. But I turn my arms over, force myself to look at the rough red lines ridging my soft skin.
Anything but that.
I let the knife clatter into the sink. Now I’m kind of coming down. Now I don’t feel very good at all. Too close today, with Riley and that man. Too close to what I used to do, and part of me wanted to see what it would feel like again, but I also wanted to make Riley’s eyes stop blinking, wanted him to stop shaking, wanted to be a good egg, a keeper, just like with Louisa. Just like I’d do for Ellis.
And that one time, that one time when I didn’t help her, when she needed help the very most she’d ever needed it, I did not help her and I lost her.
The room is closing in on me. I yank open the door. I could go downstairs, have one of the men on the porch take my money to the liquor store. I’m just about to leave when the door across the hall opens and a small, dirty-faced woman comes out. I don’t know her name, she’s only been here a few days, but we’ve passed in the hall, with her pressing herself against the wall if I get too close. She talks to herself a lot in her room at night, a lot of muttering.
“Hey,” I say, before I chicken out. “You got anything to drink in there? I’ll pay you.” I pull out a five-dollar bill from my pocket.
Her little eyes are like raisins. She’s wearing a stained tank top. Faded tattoos stretch across her chest. Names, mostly, but I can’t make them out. She looks down at the money. My hand is shaking. When she reaches out to snatch the bill, I see her hand is shaking, too. She goes back into her room and slams the door.
When she comes out, she shoves a cheap bottle of wine, a screw-top, at me and then takes off down the hall. Her flip-flops thwack down the sixteen steps to the first floor.
I don’t even wait to eat something. I unscrew the cap and take long pulls until I start to gag a little, then I pour the rest down the sink before I drink any more. It hits me quickly, the dizziness, the warmth followed by the little feeling of elation in my stomach. It’s enough to tamp down my anxiety. I feel bad, but I made a choice. Cutting or drinking, and I chose drinking.
In the bag Riley gave me, I find a small burrito wrapped in foil. It’s stuffed with chicken, shredded cheese, chilies, and sour cream. A tiny mountain of crisp hash browns borders the burrito. They’re still warm, lovely and greasy on my tongue. I finish everything, even the wet bits that fall on my lap. I pull the white napkin out of the bag to wipe my face and a twenty-dollar bill falls out. I can only guess that it’s an extra thank-you from Riley.
I pick up the book I checked out of the library earlier in the week. Drawing is a state of being, I read. An interaction between eye, hand, model, memory, and perception. The representational method…
I sigh, closing the book and pushing it to the edge of the table. I think of the woman with the muraled house, her garden like a castle. Soon, Lacey in 3C will begin to cry in her room, like she does every night, a snuffling, hiccupping sound. Schoolteacher downstairs will watch reruns of The Price Is Right all night, the bells and whistles and audience chatter trickling up through the floorboards. The men on my floor will stagger down the hall to the shared bathroom, groan and piss.
I draw like a demon, but this time on the wall next to my bed, filling up all the emptiness that surrounds me, some kind of mural of my own to wrap me up and keep me safe, until the wine pushes me into sleep.
The next time, the man on the couch isn’t so talkative. This time, the red-and-yellow-haired woman lingers a little longer as I gather the sack and stuff it into my pocket and as I leave, she says, “You tell Riley Wendy says hey. You tell Riley, Wendy sure does miss him.” That makes me wince. Were they together once? I try not to think about that.
At the café, I hand him the bag, watch as he rushes to the bathroom. Tanner is paging through a bo
ok of glossy, odd-looking photographs. He lifts it up for me to see. “Eye out of orbit,” he says. “I’m gonna be an EMT.”
The photograph shows the profile of a stunned-looking man, his eyeball sprung from the socket, connected by a cartoonish zigzag of artery. It’s gross and I make a face. “Shit happens,” Tanner murmurs. “The human body is a wonderful thing in all its fucked-upness.”
Linus walks through the double doors, wiping her hands on her apron. She gags at the photo and Tanner laughs. I look up, catch her smiling at me, but I look back down at the white plates, the squares of wheat bread and hot cheese that I’m flipping while Riley’s in the bathroom.
Linus says, “It’s okay to talk to us, you know. We don’t bite.”
Tanner says, “Sometimes I do,” and they laugh, but not at me, I can tell, so I kind of laugh, too. I’m getting better at being around them, talking a little more.
Riley returns. I can tell he’s deliberately avoiding looking at Linus because he gets busy right away with prep work.
His skin gives off the cold scent of water. The color’s returned to his cheeks, his eyes are liquid light. Whistling, he slips the spatula from my fingers and quick, quick, he flips the hills of hash browns, preps a plate, oils a dry spot on the grill. He’s quiet until Linus and Tanner have walked to the front to check the coffee urns. When they do, he leans down, his breath warm on my cheek, and whispers, “You’re a real good girl.”
The rain happens very early, while I’m riding my bicycle to Riley’s to wake him up for work. It was humid all night and I slept with the fan right against my body, but it didn’t do any good. I rinsed off in cold water in the tub, but my clothes stuck to me the instant I got outside.
About halfway to his house, it’s as though someone drew a dark curtain across the sky and suddenly, the fattest rain I’ve ever seen or felt starts pouring down. It’s like a thousand faucets have gone off in the sky at once. The street fills up instantly and cars driving by skitter and splash even more water all over me. I almost crash when someone hits a puddle and the water slashes across my face. The rain is warm and powerful.
Girl in Pieces Page 18