Silver Girl
Page 1
The Unnamed Press
P.O. Box 411272
Los Angeles, CA 90041
Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © 2018 by Leslie Pietrzyk
ISBN: 978-1-944700-53-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017963879
This book is distributed by Publishers Group West
Cover design & typeset by Jaya Nicely
Cover Artwork by Jennis Li Cheng Tien
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to info@unnamedpress.com.
This book is for
my sister, Susan,
and for Lisa
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE: The Devil’s Daughter
PART I: THE MIDDLE
Headache
Strategies for Survival #8: Mental Health
Jewels
Strategies for Survival #4: Lists
What Do You Want for Christmas, Little Girl?
Jinx
The Third Rail
The Gates of Heaven
PART II: THE BEGINNING
Strategies for Survival #5: Practicality
Bad Girl
Through the Door
Gift Exchange
Shadow Daughter
How We Leave Home
PART III: THE END
The Bedroom
Give the Lady What She Wants
Strategies for Survival #3: Silence
Strategies for Survival #2: Denial
Reckless
Strategies for Survival #6: Thinking
Pretty
Strategies for Survival #7: Balance
Two Girls
From Iowa
PART IV: WHERE EVERY STORY TRULY BEGINS
The Silver Girl
Terrible Beauty
Strategies for Survival #1: Numb
Today
Historical Note about the Tylenol Murders
Acknowledgments
Book Club Discussion Guide
Early versions of these chapters were previously published in the following magazines and journals: “Shadow Daughter,” Hudson Review; “Give the Lady What She Wants,” Gettysburg Review; “How We Leave Home,” Cincinnati Review; “Bad Girl,” River Styx; “Headache,” WIPs (Works [of Fiction] in Progress); “The Devil’s Daughter,” Midwestern Gothic.
THE DEVIL’S DAUGHTER
1980
(fall, freshman year)
My roommate arrived first, staking her claim. Probably someone told her to do it that way, her cum laude mother or Ivy League dad or an older sibling or cousin in college. I had no one telling me anything. So I didn’t know to take the overnight bus to Chicago from Iowa instead of the one arriving late in the afternoon, meaning when I unlocked the dorm room door I saw a fluffy comforter with bright poppies already arranged on the bed along the wall with the window, cracked open to grab the only breeze. Several dozen white plastic hangers holding blazers and skirts and blouses filled the closet with the door where F U wasn’t gouged into the wood.
I rubbed my fingers along the grooves of those letters, imagining a deeply angry freshman girl digging a nail file from the clutter of her purse and carving those letters into the wood, while, at the library, her roommate wrote a smart paper about Jane Austen, or blew her boyfriend in a car parked by the lake, or spray-painted acorns lustrous gold for table centerpieces at a sorority mother-daughter tea. I hoped my roommate wouldn’t be that angry girl.
Also, I hoped I wouldn’t be.
I admired the precise lettering—straight, even; a challenge creating perfect lines in the cheap veneer—and then slid open this closet door to find a handful of flimsy, misshapen wire hangers. I trailed my fingers along them once, twice, noting their musical jingle, and then hung up my skirts, blouses, and blazer (singular). These items filled about a foot of space, even including my parka for winter. I bunched the rest of my clothes—T-shirts, underwear, jeans, socks—into two of my four dresser drawers, organizing furtively, as if I didn’t want to be caught taking them from my duffel and trunk. Then I stared into my roommate’s open closet, counting, adding, trying to do the math to determine the algebraic equation that would tell me how many combinations of outfits were possible with ten blouses and nine blazers and sixteen skirts and three dresses and a handful of scarves and—
The doorknob jiggled and I had only enough time to slide shut her closet and grab my plastic-wrapped Kmart Bluelight Special markdown sheet set before the door popped open and a girl with bright turquoise eyes wedged her head through the doorway and said, “Got any masking tape I could borrow?” Her eyes were the color of things I’d seen in National Geographic: lakes, oceans, seas, vast skies stretching above plains and pampas, velds and savannas and deserts. Later, I learned she wore colored contacts, which, for a long time, made me believe she saw the world through a blue haze. “I’m Jess, next door, from Oak Lawn, comm studies major.” She pushed the door wider, angling herself into the center of the frame.
I didn’t want her to leave, so about her request for tape I said, “Hang on, maybe,” and I rooted in the chaos of crap at the bottom of my trunk, pretending I might logically expect to find a roll of masking tape, when no one had told me to bring such a thing to college—though apparently no one had told her either.
“Did you meet your roommate yet?” she asked me.
I shook my head. “Just her stuff, all of it,” and I swept one arm in a wide semicircle encompassing the glossy stereo system on the cinder-block-and-plank bookcase and plastic milk crates filled with records and her half of the school-issued bulletin board tacked with photos of perky girls with waves of dark feathered hair, so many girls and so much hair that I couldn’t tell if each was a different girl or if I was seeing the same one in a fun house of mirrors, over and over, this same girl, my new roommate. Dangling off a plastic thumbtack was a strand of pearls like the pearls I owned, but I was guessing hers were real, unlike mine, which weren’t.
“She’s from Fort Lauderdale,” Jess said. “Voice major. Already planning to pledge Theta, she told me, because she heard from someone it’s the best house on campus. But so sorry to say there’s no way they’ll take her because she’s Jewish.”
I leaned back on my heels, abandoning the fake search for the imaginary roll of masking tape. It was a whirl of information, in a language foreign to me—not the words, but how they were put together, and also the whole. A sorority wouldn’t want a Jewish girl? A girl with nine blazers and sixteen skirts? With three rows of wool sweaters stacked six or seven each? A girl so cavalier with pearls that she draped them over a thumbtack? I wouldn’t be that casual with my fakes, which my mother and I picked out for my birthday at the jewelry counter at Younkers department store. They were 30 percent off, but the saleslady acted like they were full price, nestling them into a white box between two pillowy squares of cotton. I kept them in that same box. There were maybe four or five Jewish kids in my whole high school, and no one treated them any differently. Though it suddenly occurred to me that if I wasn’t one of them, how could I know?
“Not that I told her that,” Jess continued. “But some guy at the comm studies welcome this morning gave me the rundown. Probably I heard wrong.” She slipped the rest of the way through the door and bounced onto my roommate’s bed, puckering the red poppies. I recognized the stitching along the leg seams of her jeans: Calvin Kleins, crisp like how Brooke Shields wore them, and on top, a man’s w
hite dress shirt with the cuffs rolled higher than anyone would roll sleeves, up to the middle of her top arm muscle. The sleeves looked strange that way, but also purposeful, and I felt I was the one in the wrong for not understanding that purpose, which was a different wrong than the tightness I felt seeing my roommate’s stacks of sweaters. Those sweaters spiked my gut with jabs of anxiety: I would never have enough, even if I could buy up a whole store, an entire mall. The sleeves, though, maybe I could learn—if I paid attention. If I paid attention, my sleeves could be interesting and purposeful.
Jess was gazing straight at me with those inhumanly blue eyes, maybe following the exact path of my thoughts. I was hunched in front of my trunk, also from Kmart. It wasn’t exactly made of cardboard, but it wasn’t real suitcase material, leather or even plastic. A little like cardboard, but definitely reinforced, with two pull-tab metal latches and a lock that had bent both of the dinky keys that came scotch-taped to the trunk’s inside. It was a heavy and ridiculous piece of luggage, but I had read Agatha Christie mysteries where characters traveled with steamer trunks on a train, and this wasn’t that, but it felt close. If it wasn’t this Kmart trunk, it would have been musty vinyl suitcases from a neighbor’s garage sale. My mother said the trunk was practical because I could double it as a coffee table, putting things on it, “a TV or record player,” she had suggested, without suggesting how those things might appear.
But the trunk wasn’t practical to haul around. After my father left me at the bus station, a long-haired man with a lisp helped heave it into the luggage hold in the belly of the bus. In Chicago, a man wearing a snowy-white navy uniform took one side handle while I grabbed the other, and we walked lopsided down the street to the el train, and together we lugged the trunk up the stairs and he pointed me to the correct side of the platform. But when I got off in Evanston, people streamed around me, unwilling to be drawn into my problem, so I dragged the trunk by one handle, pretending not to hear the screeching and clanging beating the metal stairs. I dragged it eight blocks on the sidewalk, to registration, including getting lost and trudging two blocks I didn’t have to. When I found the registration line, some of the dads helping their daughters jumped in, and my arms ached enough that I let them, despite their daughters’ eyes needling me, petulant, pouting for me to find my own father instead of hogging up theirs. Now, the trunk was a scraped-up, shredded, banged-apart, embarrassing mess, barely a functional trunk, let alone a “table” where my roommate might stack her silvery-sleek stereo components. Much of the fake brass trim lining the edges of the trunk was bent and mangled, including a six-inch prong forking up off the bottom seam. I’d already gouged my calf against it, enough to bleed.
Jess shifted her weight, and the bed ground out a wrenching groan, like a strangled elephant, a sure sign that my roommate hadn’t sat on this bed before claiming it. Jess bounced again and again, making the bed screech, a tiny smile jiggling her face as if she knew exactly what I was thinking. I was wary of smiling back. I had no idea why she rolled up her sleeves the way she did or how her eyes were that dramatic blue; there were many things I didn’t know, so many I couldn’t even say for sure what they all were. I should not have come to this school, lugging a cardboard trunk behind me—yes, time to admit it was cardboard, time to admit I was a Beverly Hillbilly, not even a Joad.
I fingered the dangling metal strip, then tenderly stroked my thumb along its razor edge, wincing at each jag. As she watched, I tugged, peeling the metal inch by inch off the trunk, the slow ratchet making me think of a dentist drilling deep, drilling to somewhere painful that would end up hurting real bad.
Jess laughed, like the tinkly keys of a piano. “That’s the most pathetic piece of luggage I’ve ever seen. It looks like it went through hell. Where’d you come from, anyways?”
“Hell,” I said. “You got it. I’m the Devil’s daughter, and he sent me to college here.”
With one last tug and a hard twist, I worked the piece of metal the rest of the way off and so there it was, overflowing the palm of my hand. I looked at the horrible, twisted, meaningless scrap. What was I supposed to do with it? The garbage can was—yes—in my roommate’s half, by her desk. I drew in a breath, a deep, calculated breath. I was here, wasn’t I? And hadn’t I gotten myself here, no thanks to anyone else? The Devil’s daughter would know when to take a chance.
So. “I want to pledge Theta, too,” I ventured. Trying out the unfamiliar word was like sliding chocolate on my tongue, that same lingering melt, that craving. “Since I’m not Jewish, I figure I’ve got a shot, right?”
Jess laughed again. “They’ll love you, Devil’s daughter,” she said. “Because I love you already.”
We were joking—both of us laughing, not meaning anything mean—but we shouldn’t have been, because anti-Semitism was wrong, wrong, wrong, a sin, sin, sin, and those discriminatory Theta girls were evil—we knew that—and since neither of us was Jewish it was especially wrong to laugh even this tiny bit, even at evil Theta girls. And a week later, when my roommate actually was cut by Theta after a single round of sorority rush—suspiciously the only sorority of seventeen to do so during three weeks of rush, to cut her and her real pearls and her sixteen skirts—and she flopped sobbing across her screechy bed, with Jess and me tag-teaming on how Theta was stupid, that she was too good for those stuck-up bitches—reciting every platitude she wanted and needed to hear, because we all three of us knew that those platitudes kept us from the truth none of us could bear to speak—that’s when I felt most terrible for those jokes with Jess. It didn’t matter that my roommate and I already deeply despised each other, that I’d decided up front to stay with her the whole year anyway, partly because it was easy enough to avoid the room, easier than paperwork and chancing someone else’s unwanted roommate, but mostly, really, truly, I was afraid that calling attention to myself to someone in authority meant they would snatch away the financial aid. And Jess lived next door, after all.
But that was later. What was right now: my guilty laughter with Jess and that awful hunk of metal heavy in my hand, the mangled trunk and my cheap Kmart sheets still shrink-wrapped in the package, those words: Because I love you already. She had spoken them easily and simply, like tossing a beanbag to a child, so she couldn’t have recognized what I did: That they were the words I longed most to hear. That it really wasn’t so terribly hard to say them. It wasn’t. That this was news to me was the real news to me.
That night I lay in bed listening to the scrape of my roommate’s breath, her off-kilter rhythm unaligned with my own. It was four in the morning and I’d counted at least a thousand imaginary sheep. I was not-sleeping in this ten-by-fifteen room, 250 miles away from the house in Iowa where I’d grown up. It was like that house didn’t exist anymore. It was gone. Everything was gone. Everything except now. I wasn’t rational. I knew I wouldn’t sleep even one minute this first night. I didn’t.
“You’re not afraid of much, are you,” Jess had also said—a statement, not a question—so she didn’t expect an answer. She could believe what she wanted, and I didn’t have to lie.
Part I: The Middle
HEADACHE
1982
(fall, junior year)
The phone on the kitchen wall rang. Jess and I stared at it in surprise. Though we had been sharing this off-campus apartment for a week already, we still didn’t feel as though we belonged here, and the ringing phone seemed to emphasize exactly how out of place we were.
“You answer,” she whispered.
It was eleven A.M., hardly a time for whispering, but I whispered back, “No, you,” and then we laughed.
Freshman year we were crammed into the hormonal all-girls dorm that had been built with money donated to the university in the early 1960s by some uptight woman who feared the coming sexual revolution. The school packed all the freshman girls there. The halls smelled like hair spray and popcorn, and someone was always crying in a bathroom stall about what a boy did or didn’t do. The joke was t
hat entire floors of girls synced their periods. It was a place to escape from. The next year, we escaped to north campus, the land of frat parties and Frisbees slicing through the quad and stereo speakers propped against window screens on sunny days.
Now, we were juniors, living together off-campus on the first floor of a small stacked duplex half a block from the el tracks. I had arrived the week before she had and was already immune to the screech and rattle of the trains.
The phone kept ringing. This was before answering machines, before voice mail, email, texts, and Skype. Letters and phone calls were all we had. This was a time when not answering a ringing phone was an act of subversion. We wanted to be subversive—or I did, secretly. That was something we had in common, secret desires. Secrets.
Jess picked up. “Hello?” Her voice croaked, and she spoke more forcefully. “I mean, hello.”
I laughed. We laughed a lot. We laughed at everything back then. Everything was funny.
She listened for a moment, her face knotting into annoyance. “I’m not coming back home, Mom. No.” Then she twirled, letting the extra-long cord wrap around herself once, twice, her back to me now. “No,” she repeated, the word swelling. “I said no.”
A pause. I watched her shoulder blades jutting and sharp through her ex-fiancé’s White Sox T-shirt.
“Stop,” she said. “I told you not to call until Thursday at the earliest.” She emphasized the last three words. I imagined a black line underscoring them.
I ran to the front door, yanked it open, and pressed the doorbell, which ding-donged loudly. Back in the living room, I leaned over the wall cutout to the kitchen. Her mother had placed a vase on this ledge that I guessed eventually would get knocked over and broken. Hopefully, it wasn’t expensive. It looked like crystal, but I couldn’t tell crystal from glass. There had been white roses in it, but Jess shoved them in the trash two seconds after her parents left from their weekend visit.