Silver Girl

by Leslie Pietrzyk

  What my mother said: That girl needs to learn control.

  I could drown myself, never emerge, but I wasn’t good even at holding my breath, and when my head bobbed up to the surface, there was Janey, sitting very still, staring over the water with the same abstract gaze as the Whistle Nazi. She said, “What are we going to do?”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “You’re too quiet,” she said. “That candy bar’s been there all afternoon. And honestly, you know you’re an unlucky person, always jinxed. You barely did it with Brad, like once or twice?”

  That was fine—let her think it was Brad. That was better.

  “I can’t tell anyone,” I said. “Not anyone. Not even one person.”

  We glanced at the clutch of girls, at my former friends, sun glare flashing off their oiled shoulders. One of them rolled over, and then another and another. I felt suddenly invisible.

  “I won’t,” she said.

  I had to trust her. So I asked, “How much money do you have?” She waitressed the late shift at Country Kitchen, when drunks and frat boys stumbled in for scrambled eggs and fried potatoes, and either they gave her excessive drunk-guy tips or else she got stiffed, no in-between.

  She hugged her knees to her chest. “Aren’t you afraid?” she asked.

  “No,” I lied.

  “Were you going to tell me?” she asked.

  So easy to lie. “When it was the right time.”

  She shook her head, hair flailing. I thought about the white puff of a dandelion gone to seed, blowing at it with one huge breath to make a wish. How little girls ran around backyards all summer blowing the tops off dandelions. I taught Grace to do that. This little girl could, too. Like me, she’d catch fireflies, and crook her eyes in her elbow at the parts of movies where animals might get hurt, and write her name across the dark with a lit sparkler, and eat her hot dogs burned black. All the things little girls did, things I did, that I taught my sister. But I shoved this little girl out of my head. I pushed her away, like pushing a swing on a playground and watching the body on it sail off into a pure blue sky. I would never think about her again. All I needed was Janey’s tip money.

  “What about him?” Janey asked.

  “What about him?”

  “You have to tell him,” she said. “Don’t you?”

  “I don’t have to do anything,” I said.

  “Wow,” she said.

  The moment fell heavily between us, separating us irrevocably but neatly, like a guillotine severing the head from the body. Every single person in the pool was screaming, yet I couldn’t distinguish a word. Janey wouldn’t meet my eyes, so I looked down at my wavy, water-distorted legs.

  “Okay. I’ll drive you,” Janey said. “I can get the car.” She and her older brother shared a crappy Pinto, the kind that might blow up if it got rear-ended. Her brother was a pothead and definitely mellow. There was nothing he cared about except pot and pizza. Janey and I talked about whether that might be a good life, pot and pizza, and sometimes we agreed it would be, and other times one of us argued it would be boring.

  “I can take the bus,” I said. “I figured out the transfer and the route.”

  She shook her head. “You can’t take the bus.”

  Exactly why I didn’t want to tell Janey, because I didn’t need her being nice. I only needed her money. But I didn’t know how to say that. So she would drive me there and call up afterward and watch me with shiny, sad eyes and hug me for no reason, hanging on until I squirmed away. I had to hate her, I had to. And she would tell: I handed over every dime of my summer tip money to my best friend for her abortion and then she left town for college without saying good-bye. When I would have done anything for her. I wondered how I would tell the story, until I remembered that I would never tell the story. That was the only bright spot: that all this could happen and no one would know.

  “I hear it’s not a big deal,” Janey said.

  “That’s what I hear, too,” I said.

  She got up into a crouch and reached out her hand to me, wanting to help me out of the pool, but what I did when I took her hand was yank really hard and dodge aside, wrenching her headfirst into the water. She shrieked, and the Whistle Nazi about broke his whistle on us, and I watched Janey’s big body lash and twist underwater, her limbs reorganize into standing, until her head emerged, her hair tamped and streaming rivulets, water beading her oily shoulders. She tugged both suit straps straight, then fixed me with her eyes. As the lifeguard yammered about roughhousing, I waited for Janey to call me a slut, to tell me to take the bus and pay for it myself besides. But she smiled at me, a too-wide, circus-clown, sad, sad, sad smile. Now she would always see me like this: pitiful.

  II.

  Maybe this story starts before that day at the pool. Maybe it starts when we were fifteen, sixteen, too old for the slumber parties we still organized, any excuse to flee our houses, dart free of our mothers’ watchful eyes. Too young for dating, we tried anyway, none of us landing with the cute crush boys of our giggles and chatter, each of us compromising, so it was homecoming dance with whoever asked, always yes-thank-you, playing at gratitude to pimply-faced boys. We didn’t talk about that boy passing us in the hall after school, that boy, the one raking his long hair back with both hands before slouching over the drinking fountain, that boy whose sudden presence in any doorway set loose a smolder of longing we knew to keep secret. Each of us kissed Janey’s pothead brother, who was surprisingly tender, bestowing secret nicknames we pressed close to our hearts. We whispered them in our dark bedrooms during icy winters and sweaty summers. I was Desi, after confessing that I wanted Desiree for my French class name, hating the teacher who assigned me Claudette and called me arrogant. But he didn’t count; he was just Janey’s brother, just a pothead drifting through the fringes of the back parking lot, smoking dope in tricked-out vans. Though he was an excellent kisser; though he never pushed for more, recognizing his exact but limited role of First Big Kiss; though Janey didn’t mind and we suspected he kissed her, too; and though we would never break tradition and not kiss him when our turn came, it was understood that kissing Janey’s pothead brother was not enough. Understood that there had to be more, and some of us needed whatever that more was, or told ourselves we did.

  “Desiree,” “desired,” “desire”... the clutch of the words, their pinch. Bearing down like a marble rolling through my brain, the echo of each syllable merging with the thump of my heart, aligning to the push and pull of my breath, melding with the drumbeat of my being, until I couldn’t speak what the word itself meant to me: it was a throb I was never without, that was all.

  My mother’s baby brother was being divorced, which didn’t happen much to people in Iowa back then, especially not twice. He landed on the battered couch in the unfinished basement, T-shirts and denim spilling from a Hefty bag after his wife kicked him out of their cheap apartment, because, he said, now she was a hot-shit secretary on the university payroll. Before, she spooned up lunches at South East Junior High, a hairnet lady no better than the others. Now, every morning she looped a paisley polyester scarf from Younkers around her neck and wore pantyhose. She kept the dog, which pissed him the most, he said, because she fed it table scraps so’s it would get fat and lazy. “I only just grabbed up my guitars,” he said, “before she was fixed to hurl them up the alley.”

  My uncle was a musician who slept all day and woke up about when my parents got home from their jobs. He’d trudge barefoot up the basement stairs, eyes watery and red-rimmed, his hair stiff with leftover sleep, a crunchy sheen to his skin, then saunter over for a mug-to-the-brim of black coffee from the fresh pot my mother put on for him right after she walked through the door. According to him, she loved him best of her brothers, even with him being the black sheep of the family till kingdom come, no matter what he did or how he proved himself, no matter if he got a gold record or if the Man in Black, Mr. Johnny Cash himself, recorded one of his songs. “People need someone
to blame for how their stinking life turned out,” he said, “and for a shitload of them, I’m it.” That’s how he explained it to me, when I sat up late at night, reading at the kitchen table, and he dragged in, the tang of cigarette smoke and butts coiled round him, shadows of rough brown liquor on his breath and smelling of something more, something leathery and sweaty that made me think of the secret pleasure of working a hunk of gristle: this essence later what I sought in every man.

  He’d drop into the chair opposite me, ask what I was reading and half listen, his eyes scattered beyond me, beyond this kitchen where the stripes on the wallpaper mismatched by a quarter inch; my mother complained but wouldn’t rip it down to put it up right. I’d go on about my book—as long as I wanted, because he didn’t stop me—so I theorized about who the murderer might be in whichever Agatha Christie I was dug into. When I was done talking, he’d take a turn, telling me about the band and the bar, who hit it good, who was trash, who played stoned or drunk or strung out, something he scorned as “disrespecting the groove.” He played guitar with a bunch of bands, his name bannering posters tacked up all around downtown; he was locally famous for his guitar playing, he told me, and I was oddly proud, as if scraps of that glory might blow my way if people at school connected him with me. When I asked why he wouldn’t stick with one band, his own band maybe named after him, he said that was going to be forever the million-dollar question, and if he had the answer he’d know why he couldn’t stick with one woman or one anything. We’d talk for an hour, maybe longer, and he’d suck down a mug of cold, leftover coffee and a juice glass of Wild Turkey, and sing lines from songs noodling in his head—“that’s where the shit is, writing songs”—and once I was brave enough to ask him to write a song about me. “You betcha,” he said, and did I want happy or sad, and “sad” was the right answer, and he said, “Good girl, it’s in the works,” and tapped his forehead with two fingers, but I never heard any lines. He wasn’t allowed to drink or smoke in the house because my mom was trying to quit both, but he did anyway on these nights. Mornings after, I’d catch my mother dumping the ashtray and rinsing the brown circle of bourbon ringing the juice glass, hurrying before my father was awake.

  I watched his head tilt when he drank, my eyes tracking the path of the bourbon rolling from the glass on down through his throat, tiny, delicate muscles rippling along his neck as brown liquid tumbled its way down. He didn’t mind when I snuck sips, and I felt—or I imagined I felt—his eyes watching the delicate muscles shift along my throat, too.

  Some nights he didn’t come home. I’d wait as long as I could stand, my face swallowed up in yawns, then tiptoe upstairs to my bedroom, intending to lie awake until the back door rasped open, instead dropping into immediate, dreamless sleep.

  Then there were three nights in a row when he didn’t come home and the ashtray stayed clean. I craved the ache and burn of his Wild Turkey, so maybe now I was an alcoholic, which is what my father called my uncle when he was out of the house, spitting the word at my mother because he thought no one else was listening.

  Janey’s pothead brother called me, wanting to go to a movie, but I said no-thank-you. When I hung up the phone, my mother didn’t set aside Family Circle, but she said, “Not like you’re collecting phone calls from boys every day, you know. Wouldn’t want you to think you’re too good for everyone. Be more like your sister, why don’t you?” My sister was at the table drawing on the back of used worksheets, picking colors from a coffee can of old, dull crayons, sitting in the chair where I would wait for my uncle. The rims of her ears flushed seashell pink. She was only five or six, and terribly quiet, the kind of little girl who sat where she was told to sit, making it easy to forget about her. Somewhere in my heart I understood I was responsible for her, but I had to not think about that. She was so quiet that I could convince myself things would work out okay for her. I wanted her to say something, to talk or cry or shriek or pound fists on the table or fling crayons to the floor. To stop drawing happy-family figures. The last thing on earth that could be true was that I thought I was too good for everyone—though possibly I thought I was too good for Janey’s pothead brother, and yet it was possible that maybe, actually, probably I wasn’t. But I had to tell myself that, yes, I was. No-thank-you, I had said, I had said that.

  I marched upstairs to my bedroom and tried on shorts in front of the dresser mirror until I figured out the shortest pair, the Levi’s cutoffs I made at the last slumber party. Then I yanked off my T-shirt and bra and slid on the bright red tube top no one but me had seen. In the mirror, my boobs looked like tomatoes, which wasn’t a good thing, but this was the sexiest shirt I owned. Maybe not buy red next time. Later, with everyone in bed, I crept downstairs and sat at the table in my outfit, barely able to focus on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I knew who had done it because I’d peeked at the last page. I could have been reading harder, better books, but I liked Agatha Christie because the problem always got solved. Plus, with so many books, nearly a hundred, I could never read them all, or if I did, it might be a thrilling accomplishment. I longed for the tickle of bourbon skimming my tongue, the abrupt burn and razor slice of it, neck muscles tightening and loosening. I wanted the bourbon. I was an alcoholic. He had to come tonight. My thoughts mishmashed on top of themselves.

  I must have set my head down and fallen asleep on top of my paperback, because I was startled to see my uncle in the doorway, a smile screwed sideways across his face. “Look at you,” he said, ambiguously. He tossed his jean jacket onto the back of a chair with a soft thump, an even drape, like of course it would land that way.

  Gravity had shifted my tube top, and I wanted to tug it higher, to my chin, wanted to run upstairs for a real shirt, for jeans that weren’t chopped apart, but I kept my hands still.

  “Look at you,” I said straight back. He stretched his black V-neck T-shirt to sniff the armpits, one then the other. “I’ll get glasses,” I said. I stood tall in front of him, sweeping in a swift, giant breath that lifted my boobs, a trick we learned at slumber parties. My shorts bit tight at my crotch, and some of the cutoff fringe felt feathery against my leg. I idly scratched a slow, teeny spiral with one thumb.

  “Glass,” he said. “Singular. I’m not taking the heat for my niece turning up drunk.” He looked away, stared at the misaligned wallpaper, and rested one hand up against a seam as if noticing it for the first time.

  I got two anyway—jelly glasses with Scooby-Doo characters, because the real juice glasses were dirty in the dishwasher—making sure to reach up to the very top shelf of the cupboard, to the way back, balancing precariously on my tippy-toes. I plunked the glasses on the table and said, “I promise I won’t get drunk.” I trailed a finger in a lazy cross-my-heart that intersected the edge of my tube top, my finger flaring off the slope of my breast, as if launched from my nipple. I let it point directly at him. His hand on the wallpaper crunched into a fist that he dropped at his side.

  “Probably should get myself some sleep,” he said, sinking into his usual chair. I understood: certain words must be spoken and dispensed with. Like lines in a play, people were assigned specific roles for right now. “One drink,” he said, reaching for his jean jacket, for the bottle tucked into the inside pocket. “Only one.”

  “One drink,” I mirrored. “Only one.”

  He poured a half inch into my Scooby glass, an inch into Shaggy, and said, “Bottoms up.” He lifted the glass to his lips, locked my gaze on to his as he watched me over the rim. A flick sent the brown liquid cascading down his throat, through those undulating muscles. His eyes pinned mine, and the rush of liquor tightened his face, almost imperceptibly, like something suddenly coated with frost, and finally a quick buzz of good sense made me afraid.

  “The narrator did it,” I said, grabbing The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. “The guy telling the story. He’s lying the whole time.” With both hands, I pressed the book to my chest, against the crack between my two boobs. Cleavage, it was called, though I had never d
ared call it that. The book was slightly sticky, or it was that patch of naked skin that was sticky. My heart hammered into the layers of paper.

  “Shoot,” he said. “Most about anyone leaves shit out when they’re telling stories and lies their ass off. That’s what a story is, a long, fearless lie unwinding.” He extended a hand for the book, which I reluctantly gave him. He glanced at the front cover, then flipped to the back, his eyes skipping the words. With one thumb he riffled the pages. Then he let the book drop upside down onto the table. It looked stupid sitting there, just as I looked stupid sitting there in my tomato-red tube top and my cutoffs, with my ragged-edged fingernails, bitten and torn, that wouldn’t hold polish more than a day without chipping. “You don’t have to drink it,” he said, nodding at my glass. Automatically, I curled my fingers, covering Scooby with my palm.

  I’d been thinking about this bourbon for three days. I’d been thinking about Janey’s pothead brother, and Janey and the rest of them whispering in the dark at slumber parties, and my mall job scooping warm Karmelkorn into cardboard boxes and plastic tubs. I wanted more than this forgettable college town in Iowa, more than what I had. I didn’t know what I wanted, only that: more. How to get it, how to get it, how to get it.

  I drank. Wild Turkey plunged into the pit of my body, into that hollow emptiness that I didn’t like to think about, filling it with an explosion of blistering flame. It was bourbon I wanted, another inch.

  Talk about Roger Ackroyd. Talk about the gig, a good one with a cranking crowd and a decent take. Two glasses of bourbon for me, bigger, taller. Five for him. We found the bottom of the bottle. When he grabbed my shoulders and jammed his lips onto mine, when his tongue scooped through my mouth, when he moaned my name—my real name, no childish nickname—and muttered, “Oh shit-shit-shit-shit,” when his hand snaked down through my tube top and I straddled him right where he sat in my father’s chair, when these things happened and then more things happened, more, I kept my eyes open. I saw everything. It was my own life arriving—finally—and there I was, watching it all spool loose.