Silver Girl

by Leslie Pietrzyk

  The next day, my uncle told my mother from then on he was crashing in a friend’s basement, on a friend’s battered couch. But also he scribbled that address across a scrap of paper that he slipped to me, and the address after that, and the address after that, so I would always know exactly where to find him. Which I did.

  III.

  Maybe the story starts on another day, the day my uncle said, “You’re a smart one,” and meant it, said, “No, really,” and then, “Really,” and I said, “Smart enough to get out of here?” and he blew cigarette smoke into some circles and said, “Smart enough to want out.” The word “how” throbbed in my brain, and I imagined driving away somewhere with him, my books and jeans in a garbage bag, a banged-up guitar case always slicing between us in the front seat, and “not that” pushed through the “how,” and when he said, “Smart enough to find your own ticket,” I thought, Yes. I thought, I can’t hate the man who thinks this.

  A college in another city would take me, if: if I convinced them my dream was to be a girl doctor or scientist, and I doled out heartbreak in an essay, and I filled out and signed financial papers myself; if I found a teacher—who was a man, who drank bourbon when he wasn’t at school or when he was—one teacher who had gone to any college in any city, who could send someone important a letter recommending me. Problem solved. Maybe that’s the day the story starts, when that silver gleam of light winked from the other side.

  Or maybe the story starts at night, on the night I listened to my father’s gentle shuffle on the hall’s shag carpet, my little sister’s bedroom door yielding to his hand, his murmur—heard or imagined—that she should stay quiet. The bed’s squeak. The squeak. That squeak. Maybe the story starts that night, or the nights I sat up late in the kitchen, flipping through English murder mysteries, pretending I cared whodunit, the overhead light blaring at its brightest, listening. Maybe this story starts on the night my grandfather’s footsteps traveled a different hall, to my father’s little-boy bedroom, my father the one told to stay quiet, and no one sitting silent guard in the kitchen. Maybe there is nowhere for this story to start.

  IV.

  I didn’t want to travel back home for Thanksgiving, so I expected Jess to invite me to her parents’ house with her. Her parents told her I was “polite” and “well-mannered.” They liked me. But she didn’t ask. Every freshman on campus was chattering about Thanksgiving break, dying to get home. Maybe Jess thought I was like them. If I mentioned Thanksgiving, Jess jumped in with “That will be great for you to be back, won’t that be great?”

  There were reasons to go home: Dorm cafeteria closed, starting Wednesday. Library closed, starting Wednesday. If I stayed, I’d be eating pork-flavored ramen noodles out of my roommate’s hotpot for five days because they were seventeen cents a package. My roommate hated my using her hotpot, claiming the water she boiled for tea tasted like meat. She hid it in a shoebox in the back of her closet. We loathed each other. If I stayed, people would feel sorry for me, even my roommate, whose parents booked her on a plane home to Fort Lauderdale.

  For my Greyhound fare, I borrowed money from my roommate’s purse and skulked around the laundry room pocketing stacks of people’s dryer quarters, and I snagged the tip jar at the campus Cone Zone when the person scooping ice cream turned her back. Someday I would repay all of this, everything. That refrain circled in my brain like a bird trapped in a room.

  My bus left Chicago at four A.M. Thursday, the cheapest fare, meaning I would pull into Iowa City around nine A.M., about when my mother started the stuffing. She loved stuffing, and Thanksgiving was the only time she allowed herself to eat it, so she would be in her best mood, listening to the Frank Sinatra records she took from the farm after my grandfather died. There was one he taught her to dance to. That one she played the most. With no one else awake, she’d keep the stereo low and she’d possibly be singing. I imagined pushing open the back door—a surprise, since I hadn’t told anyone I was coming, because that’s how expensive long distance was—my mother’s startled smile (I hoped), a tight hug (I hoped). She’d hand me an apron, and I’d start chopping onions right alongside her. We wouldn’t talk; we were better off with a task, when we had something to think about that wasn’t conversation, so we’d dice onions and celery, and there’d be the sizzle of real butter in the frying pan, and she’d sing “I’ve Got the World on a String.” She knew each word exactly how Frank sang it.

  Grace would be next awake, and she’d wrap her arms around my waist and squeeze. She wouldn’t talk either, but she’d be happy. Maybe she’d sit at the table and read. Or she might draw. She loved to draw animals and families. Her lips moved when she read, but maybe she finally broke that habit while I was away. She’d tuck her bare feet up on the chair rung to get them off the cold floor. She’d draw a picture of me.

  That’s what I imagined. That’s as far as I got.

  The reality was I had to get to the house from the bus station. Usually I would expect to wait for a city bus, but none ran on Thanksgiving. If I called for a ride, the surprise would be wrecked. There would be talking. I couldn’t stop at hello.

  I stood at the pay phone, nickels scraping together in my fist. The huddle of people exiting the bus with me had dispersed immediately: collapsed into noisy, sloppy hugs, everyone exclaiming how great it was to see everyone, how great everyone looked, then dashing outside to waiting cars with running engines billowing white clouds that lingered like mist after the parking lot emptied. A single hovering taxi got snapped up, not that I had cash for a taxi, and not that that would work, Chicago me pulling up like a queen. “You come from Chicago in that thing?” my mother would say. “Well la-di-da to you.”

  The rain nailing the window looked vicious and cold, ready to jump the line over to sleet. I only had a backpack to carry, but our house was across town, two long miles, almost three.

  Still, I didn’t call. I couldn’t. I imagined onions and celery sputtering in that pool of real butter, my thumb and two fingers crackling leaves of sage into powdery bits: the bottomless scent of sage and thyme and butter and my mother’s Wind Song perfume, her only everyday indulgence. The turkey resting on the counter, a heap of pale flab pocked with goose pimples, but we would knead handfuls of soft butter onto it, up and underneath each fold of skin, then rain a shower of salt and pepper and paprika: our day together a fervent vigil of basting and peeking and worrying, aromas rolling in waves, our stomachs pleasantly anxious with hunger. Throughout, Frank Sinatra crooning and the slight clickety of the record reaching its end, my sister hopping up to drop the needle back at the beginning, sending Frank’s orchestra on another round. The warm kitchen. The plates with the yellow roses from my mother’s dead mother who I never knew, the dishes we weren’t allowed to use unless it was a holiday because one might chip or break. Ironing the tablecloth, stiffening it with starch and chunky squirts of steam. The quiet morning. The morning like everyone else’s morning: the people who had gotten off the bus, Jess with her parents in Oak Lawn, my roommate in Fort Lauderdale. A TV commercial morning. “What are you thankful for?” people asked on TV Thanksgivings, and right now, until I dialed, it was possible someone would speak those words today at my house.

  The nickels were warm in my hand, and solid.

  It would be my father who would drive to get me. My father would be there. Of course.

  Finally I picked up the phone and pressed the coins into the slot, listening to their jangle and then the dial tone. I went through the seven numbers. I expected the bark of my father’s sleep-rage—“Wha—?”—or my mother, a rough sigh, impatient as she eyed pans simmering on the stove. But the phone simply rang. And rang. Ten times, fifteen, twenty. I stopped counting. What a lonely sound, an embarrassing sound: a phone echoing across an empty house because no one was home. Not even a dog or cat listening. (“Pets eat,” my mother said, “who can afford that?” She said something like that about everything.) I hung up, my money spitting back out at me.

  You told
us you were leaving. I could hear my mother’s words as if she stood next to me, whispering them. You left. You left us. You left us. Only she wouldn’t be bold enough to say “us,” though I understood the “us” was there and, now, always would be.

  The bus station wasn’t a place where anyone would want to wait: two short lines of bolted-to-the-ground bucket seats in blue leatherette made it impossible to lie down, and the vending machine was stripped, except for one slot of flamboyantly orange peanut butter crackers. The drinking fountain dribbled water and out-buzzed the fluorescent lights overhead. I smelled little-kid vomit when I turned my head left.

  The redheaded man at the ticket counter perched on a stool, looking my way, though it was possible he was merely staring into space, which is what I hoped. His eyes looked ironed flat, like his IQ might be in the double digits, like sitting here might be the only job he would have in his life. I hoped he wasn’t watching me, worrying I might cry, wondering what to say. He wouldn’t have missed the empty clang of the coins rattling down the chute. I suspected he saw countless sad stories unfold in the bus station, and I suddenly understood that mine wasn’t even the saddest. Thinking that made me more pitiful, more embarrassed, and then he dipped his head and flipped over a page of comics in his newspaper with a soft rustle.

  I didn’t blame him. I looked like a loser. I had abandoned them, all of them—my sister, my mother, Janey, Janey’s pothead brother who smashed up the Pinto two days before I went to Chicago, the teachers who wanted to help me, my uncle, even this dumb ticket man staring blankly at his paper—and how dare I think that after leaving them as I had that I could return any time I wanted. There was no one to call. There was no one here.

  The ticket man said, “Next bus heading to Chicago pulls in at twelve-oh-seven roundabouts.” He spoke loudly, as if making a scheduled announcement to the room, eyes directed upward, at the wall clock.

  I nodded, appreciative of this sliver of kindness, and slumped deep into a bucket seat, backpack on the floor, straps tangled in my feet. I wanted to kick it hard across the room. Maybe I misdialed, or maybe they were in the bathroom or down in the basement where there was no extension. Maybe the phone company had an outage for a minute. I thought about trying again. Because where would they be? We always had Thanksgiving at home; there were out-of-town aunts and uncles and cousins who came, but they came to us, not the other way. I jumped up, hurried back to the phone, the man’s eyes tracking me.

  The coins were poised at the slot, and I let them go. Chink, clink, and that catch of the dial tone. I punched each number deliberately, pausing after the confirming beep, the random pattern of these numbers carved into my memory. I closed my eyes and listened to the ring.

  There were two phones in that house, one mounted on the kitchen wall, crossing over the seam where the stripes didn’t match. That phone was dull yellow, with a short cord, so you had to sit at the close chair of the kitchen table. Anyone heard what you said when you talked on this phone. The other phone was upstairs in my parents’ bedroom; it was no-nonsense black and heavy and sat in the middle of my father’s nightstand. A coil of thin cord attached it to the wall, and when you were feeling brave, you could grab that phone and let the cord snake behind as you walked into the bathroom, where you could balance on the edge of the tub for a halfway-private conversation, until he or my mother hollered to hang up already, or someone needed the bathroom, or you imagined you heard the slow creep of footsteps edging the door. That phone gave the illusion of privacy, but it wasn’t private. That was the phone my father called my uncle on, threatening to sic his old high school buddy the cop if he ever came around again. “Or maybe I’ll kill you myself,” he said with slow, practiced calm, “depending on the mood you catch me in.” That was the phone my mother used to call my uncle and arrange to meet at First National Bank downtown, so she could withdraw money from Grace’s savings account so he could make rent. The day before I ran off to Chicago, I called my uncle on that phone, needing to tell him I was fine, that I was fine, that they said everything worked out fine, though he had no idea why I wouldn’t be fine, but some girl named Sandy said my uncle had hitched to New York or New Orleans or somewhere last week and skipped out on rent again and could I...?

  I opened my eyes. Hung up the phone. I took my coins, dug out the last few from my backpack, and plunked them down the vending machine and ate six packages of peanut butter crackers for Thanksgiving dinner, and waited for the bus to Chicago. The man at the ticket counter dozed over his newspaper, chin bobbing above his chest, a light snore now and again. The sleet storm clawed at the large windows overlooking the empty bus bay. I thought about telling this to Jess: my mother’s stuffing recipe, Frank Sinatra, the four of us linking hands around the table covered with the embroidered cloth my great-grandmother brought from Luxembourg, each of us listing three things we were thankful for, the buttery crackle of turkey skin, letting Grace win the wishbone battle, my mother dropping one of the yellow rose saucers on the floor but it miraculously not breaking, seconds and thirds on pumpkin pie, and sprawling on the living room carpet rubbing our bellies, all of us laughing at the same nothing.

  I thought about my story all morning, waiting for the storm-delayed bus to drag in, and later, slumped in an aisle seat at the back next to a tattered man sniffle-shooting the snot back up his nose every two seconds, and on the el from the bus station while watching a mother half-heartedly joggle an ugly, cow-eyed baby against her shoulder as it squalled, and trudging from the el to the dorm under burned-out streetlights, kicking a dented RC can along the sidewalk; I thought about my story so hard that it became real, and I couldn’t wait to tell Jess, who loved best that we were all laughing on the floor even though no one knew what was so funny.

  Then Jess told me her story. It sounded about as good as mine, with her mother buying goofy matching turkey aprons for everyone, including her dad, and her sister reading a poem she wrote in school instead of saying boring grace, and Jess rolling out the pie crusts perfectly without any help. A great Thanksgiving, we agreed, great.

  V.

  Here could be the ending of our story. Which is that place where every story truly begins.

  Part III: The End

  THE BEDROOM

  (fall, junior year)

  Early morning after the night Penny arrived. My neck was kinked, knotted as old-fashioned bakery bread, and my mind half caught in sleep, meandering through flutters of dreams—sitting at a picnic table with knights, chatter about swapping horses so I’d have a white one—and it came to me that I was on the couch. I dragged the pillow over my face, then remembered Penny, and I flung the pillow to the ground and sat up to stiletto jabs in my lower back. Apparently I had become an old lady overnight, and I gently twisted my torso one way, then the other, until the pain eased. The objects in the room were early-morning fuzzy, scribbled into place instead of cleanly drawn; the flurried, pale light in the window was still gray. I stood, thinking I’d pee and then read a chapter of my boring art history textbook until I fell back asleep, but walking out of the bathroom, I paused in the hallway. Jess’s perfume. She alternated between Lauren, which I liked, which is what I smelled now, and Bill Blass, which was overly sweet, like cotton candy dissolving into the heavy air of a humid day. When I’d spritzed the tiniest squirt of Lauren onto my wrist from the bottle she gave me for Christmas freshman year, she’d lectured me not to be stingy, to spray two full seconds behind my knees and along the inside of one thigh. Why only one? I wondered, but I did as she said whenever I was going out, which made me feel reckless and decadent. I hadn’t heard her come in, though I was right there on the couch, and she was a flouncer, not a tiptoer. I stood for a moment, sensing a forced quality to the stillness, as if something was about to make noise but was trying not to.

  I stepped to her room and whispered, “Jess?” as I slipped through the door, partway open. It was like plunging underwater through way too much Lauren, and I hacked out a cough. There was Penny, hunched in Jes
s’s desk chair, the tiny seashell lamp switched on to the lowest setting. She jumped up, dropping a cassette case onto the desk, mumbling a fast “sorry” at the clatter. Jess’s makeup—silvery cases of Clinique, the pale green “bonus gift with purchase” samples she was addicted to getting for “free” from Marshall Field’s—was heaped on the desk, with a tattle-tale smear of Raspberry Glacé ringing Penny’s mouth, Jess’s favorite color. The tube was rolled open, revealing the groove worn by Jess’s lips, and I felt as though something very intimate was exposed. This moment should have been like catching a naughty three-year-old at play, something simple. It wasn’t. Nothing about Penny felt playful, and I had the sense that she knew exactly what she was doing.

  I waited for her to explain, but she remained silent, rubbing Kleenex across her mouth, smudging the lipstick into a pink shadow. She balled up the used tissue in her fist. “Over there,” and I pointed to Jess’s wicker basket for trash that she was forever emptying, irritated by any accumulation of garbage. Her makeup in a jumble would drive her crazy.

  “I’m fine,” Penny said.

  One of Jess’s composition books of lists was spine-up on the bed, opened flat, next to a handful of loose papers. I guessed Penny had been reading it. “You shouldn’t be in here,” I said. I tried to balance my voice exactly into the kind sternness of an elementary school teacher. Her mother just died horrifically, I reminded myself, and her father dumped her here because there was nowhere for her to go. It’s a world with a random murderer.