Silver Girl

by Leslie Pietrzyk

  I thought about my mother growing up in Iowa, a young girl with exquisite, tiny feet, letting herself kiss strangers on buses or in bars. Maybe she was like Jess, expecting and waiting for “the one.” And there was my father, maybe “the one” or maybe not, probably not, but she was tired of waiting. Marrying him meant no more men on the list—that she understood clearly. And—she thought, she was so sure!—marrying him would also mean no more wanting. But what I could tell that girl in Iowa is that nothing, nothing—not the marriage, not the list, not anything I knew—was ever the end of that constant ache, of wanting to be wanted.

  I tuned in as Jess wound down, finally saying, “Anyway, I should get organized or something.”

  I said, “Me too,” even though I’d unpacked when I moved in on the first, and I didn’t have half as much stuff as she did, so it wasn’t such a big deal. I took an hour, tops.

  But neither of us moved. The room was shadowy, lit by the pale blue glow of the stereo receiver and the single floor lamp. I remembered a girl on our dorm floor freshman year who got kicked out after her roommate busted her for growing pot under a grow light. The roommate expected to be given all A’s on her report card, like a reward, and of course she wasn’t, and everyone hated her behind her back. I missed the pot-growing girl, who popped a lot of popcorn that she shared with anyone around, but I was happy that thin glowing line of purple seeping under the door was gone. The funny thing was that even with it not there, I still saw it every time I walked down the hallway late at night. Lots of things that were gone had a way of going nowhere. Maybe Linda, too.

  I said, “Doesn’t freshman year already seem like a long time ago? Or even last year?”

  Jess said, “You know, I’m still thinking about that guy on the el.”

  “Forget him,” I said. “If I don’t even know his name he can’t be ‘the one,’ right?”

  “Like maybe there’s something you’re not telling me,” Jess said.

  “I tell you everything,” I said. I shook my head for emphasis. Jess liked emphasis. She was very dramatic, dramatic enough to be a theater major.

  “I just...” She trailed off, waiting for me to ask, Just what?

  Instead I said, “Do you tell me everything?”

  “Natch,” she said, drawing it out, then adding, “Did you know that comes from ‘naturally’? I always thought it was a separate word. I mean, look how it’s spelled. It isn’t even logical.”

  I laughed.

  It could have ended there.

  She said, “I just think you’re that kind of person who holds a little back.”

  I set my Tab on the floor and stretched my arms wide open, as wide as they would go.

  Now she laughed.

  I imagined blurting out, You’re right, I do have a few things to tell you, some whopping big secrets, and one stupid man on the el isn’t even where it begins or ends. I imagined my secrets bubbling out, words spilling and gushing like water from a broken hydrant, words flowing so fast I couldn’t stop if I wanted to, every last secret out where Jess could see it. Would she listen past Tommy? I wondered. Could she look me in the eye for any of it, see who I really was?

  And after. I imagined Jess’s face, and then her mother’s face when Jess told her, and then her father’s face when her mother told him, and all the faces after that. I imagined the rest of my life, knowing they knew my horrible monster-self. Once I let those words out, they couldn’t go back in. They would turn real. What happened would be real. I imagined mumbling, Just kidding, afterward, but way too late. I imagined Jess telling it later, turning this moment into a dinner party story about her sad, crazy college roommate. I imagined being the sad, crazy college roommate for the rest of my life. From Iowa, someone might remember, half remember, wasn’t that the girl?

  Jess was uncharacteristically lost in thought, not noticing me and how I was observing her. Maybe she was also imagining. She tucked her legs up into an inverted V, propping her feet on the edge of the chair cushion and folding her arms tightly around her shins. She bowed her head and balanced one cheek against her kneecap, closed her eyes. She seemed to shrink into the tiniest scrap of space possible. Jess sat that way for a long moment while I watched her. I tried not to think of anything except how almost alike we felt right now. The moment would pass. It always did.

  I had escaped Iowa. I had escaped.

  Part IV: Where Every Story Truly Begins

  THE SILVER GIRL

  (summer, after sophomore year)

  Nearing the end of summer. I smelled like fried chicken because I always smelled like fried chicken because the only place that picked me up after I got fired from selling popcorn at the movie theater was the Kentucky Fried Chicken on Muscatine Avenue. I had to swear I was sticking around Iowa City into fall, which wasn’t any part of my plan. I was back here only for the summer, only to make money for school, only around for the cheap living. But I was a good liar.

  People I knew bought fried chicken. Janey. Girls from City High who spent the day tanning at Mercer pool because they didn’t need jobs. Guys who were or used to be big shots on the football team. Parents I’d babysat for. These people ordered snack packs and buckets but never said hi, because they didn’t look at my face or see beyond the ridiculous candy-cane-striped smock and the poufed-up hat that made me look like I had an Afro. They just didn’t see me. Which was fine.

  People probably wouldn’t like fried chicken so much if I told them what went on in the back. But I kept my mouth shut. I couldn’t lose this job also. I needed the money. I needed the free chicken that I brought home to Grace so she got decent food during this stretch of however long it was and would be, with our mother moonlighting nights at the bakery while also answering phones for the radio station. If there wasn’t chicken, Grace would be eating Frosted Flakes out of the box, because that was all our mom thought to pick up at the 7-Eleven in the twenty minutes she had for shopping between shifts. Cereal and bologna and Wonder bread for my dad’s sandwiches, but that was his. My mom didn’t eat. She’d taken up smoking again and said she wasn’t hungry. She said cigarettes had zero calories, and same with black coffee. She would live on that for the summer, she said, and lose ten pounds. But she didn’t look thinner to me, just tired. We barely saw her. She was a ghost passing through walls, either late to somewhere better than here or sleeping off a handful of pills.

  Grace ate only drumsticks and biscuits. She wouldn’t touch coleslaw or the mashed potatoes. I couldn’t blame her. Coleslaw and mashed potatoes should be homemade, cooked with love or at least affection. This food was institutional, not nourishing. Just something going down our throats.

  I took on every available shift, snapped up anyone’s unwanted hours, and I was so tired that summer, so greasy and tired, but every night after work, however late it was, I sat at the kitchen table with Grace while she nibbled at a drumstick or two. She played she was a chipmunk sometimes, making lots of teeny-tiny bites, packing meat in her puffed-up cheeks until I told her to swallow it. She was that young, still pretending things. I wanted her to outgrow this habit and also I wanted her not to, not quite yet. My mother wasn’t around to nag her to go to bed, so she waited up for me. She said she wasn’t tired, which kind of made me mad, because I was tired all the time, all the time. I could have slept for six days straight, was how I felt.

  “You tell a story and I’ll draw the pictures,” Grace said. “Like a book.” Grace had eyes that never seemed to blink, often pinned right on me, like they were accusing me of something. I hated her eyes. I hated how tired I was always, and being this tired at twenty years old. Maybe I also hated my sister, though I wouldn’t dare say so.

  Those eyes. A blotchy smear of grease around her lips. Uncombed hair. Chewed-up fingernails. She never asked for anything, only a story she could draw. If I stopped bringing home chicken, she wouldn’t ask why. She’d just go back to handfuls of dry cereal. She was used to not asking questions.

  So I invented a story for her that we c
alled “The Silver Girl.” For Grace’s birthday, I gave her new crayons, the sixty-four box with the special sharpener right inside, because the most she’d had before was forty-eight. The silver crayon was her favorite, so I gave her a story for it. She had sharpened it already half a dozen times, making it the shortest in the box. It would disappear by the end of summer. She liked silver the best, she said, because it was second best, not as good as gold, and she felt sorry for it.

  Every story started with “Once upon a time.” And each was separate. The Silver Girl didn’t string along in never-ending, world-saving adventures; she was invented fresh each time I told a story, meaning I didn’t have to remember what happened before. I could simply start with “Once upon a time.” The Silver Girl had absolutely no history or past. We liked that about her.

  “Once upon a time,” I began, “there was a girl who lived in a cave.”

  “Make it the woods,” Grace said. “I like drawing trees.”

  “A cave,” I said. I always started with the Silver Girl in a cave. I liked to insist, and she liked me to insist.

  “A cave, but a cave in a forest,” Grace said, with a quick, shy smile. She didn’t smile much because her front teeth came in crooked and some idiot in her class last year went around calling her “mule-mouth.” Our father thought that was funny, so he called her that, too. Our mother didn’t hear because she wasn’t around, but she wouldn’t have heard anyway.

  “Hmm...”—fake dramatic pause—“okay, a cave in a forest.” I always let Grace win, which she knew, and she started drawing. I said, “This girl who lived in a cave that was deep in the forest was called the Silver Girl, because everything about her was the color of silver: her hair was silver, her skin was silver, her eyes were silver. She was totally silver.”

  “Even her toenails?”

  “Even her toenails,” I said. “Everything was silver. If she tripped and skinned her knee and it bled, the blood was silver and then the scab that came later was silver, and if there was a scar, it was a skinny silver line streaking across her silver skin.”

  This was how every story began, talking about how precisely silver the Silver Girl was. Was her stomach inside her body silver? Yes. Was each tiny eyelash silver, each hair in both eyebrows? Yes. If she sneezed, was her snot silver? Yes. Did she have silver freckles? Every thing about the Silver Girl was silver. If she got zits, they would be silver, and so would the goo that came out if she squeezed them. Often that was the whole story, how silver the Silver Girl was. I’d repeat “silver this, silver that,” until “silver” sounded like a made-up, nonsense word, but that’s what Grace liked, so I did it her way. I never got red-faced, slamming my hand on the table, yelling, I said she’s all goddamn silver, so she’s silver, every goddamn inch of her! Even after half an hour of body parts, even when we verged on disgusting, I was calm: “Yes, her poo is silver, and what she wipes onto the toilet paper is also silver.”

  I don’t know why Grace liked this litany of questions so much, but she did. She wanted to ferret out a loophole but was relieved she couldn’t.

  Sometimes the story moved ahead. Grace would let me know when. “Were there animals in the forest?” she might ask.

  Whatever she asked, I said yes. A theater major told me this was the theory of improv comedy, to always say yes. “Yes, there were animals in the forest where the cave was. Two elephants, a herd of ostriches, and a rhino named Sam.” That was Grace’s favorite name. All her Barbies were named Sam, all her stuffed animals. Now and then she slipped and accidentally called me Sam, making my heart break just a little because she apologized right away though I said she shouldn’t.

  We might veer off into other animals: “Were there fawns?” “Seventeen fawns, each with a different pattern of spots on their backs,” which made for good coloring. Or we might scoot past the animals, with Grace asking if Sam and the Silver Girl played games together. “Yes,” I would say, “she and Sam went swimming in the lake on sunny days, but when it rained, they sat on the floor in the cave and played board games.” Did they play Parcheesi? Did they play Chutes & Ladders? Candy Land? Chinese checkers? Yes, I would say to each game, adding that Sam got the red markers in Parcheesi because red was his favorite color and the Silver Girl got to be the top hat when they played Monopoly. Or maybe the Silver Girl would be planning a birthday party, so what cakes should she bake—chocolate, angel food, spice, white, yellow? And what was she going to serve with her cake? Caramel corn and corn dogs and dog biscuits, because a dozen puppies were invited, and those biscuits from a tube you banged open on the counter... Yes to whatever Grace proposed.

  They were stories of no drama. The end would come when I fell asleep while talking, my head propped in the upraised palm of my hand, my elbow balancing the weight just so. Not that hard to do. Droopy eyes, swallowed yawns, each word weighing a ton, and then I was asleep, blissfully free from the Silver Girl’s ice-cream flavors. That’s how tired I was all the time that summer. Only for a couple of minutes, and I’d startle awake, terrified I’d made a terrible mistake. But there was Grace coloring, crayons lined up, her bottom lip stuck between her teeth.

  And there were the naked chicken bones on a napkin. My sister ate every scrap of chicken and shred of skin, down to the hard gray bones. Those bare bones looked too much like her skinny arms and the jut of her elbows as she colored. This was the moment when I lost my patience and snapped that it was time for bed, that it was way past midnight or one, and that she had to go to bed now—as harsh as a whisper got, because waking our father would be a disaster—and we’d tiptoe up to her room and she’d ask me to stay with her and I’d say I would and she’d say, “I mean all night this time,” and I’d say again that I would, and she’d catch me with her unblinking eyes, and I’d repeat, “All night. I’ll be right here next to you all night,” and we’d squeeze into the skinny twin bed wedged between the wall and dresser and she’d say, “Promise,” and I’d take in a deep breath, being patient again, and exhale all the air out into one word: “Promise,” and I would mean it. I would really mean it, and she would cozy herself in, one arm slung over an old teddy bear with a missing eye that she’d had about since she was born.

  But I left as soon as she was asleep, which I could tell because she’d twitch—arm or leg—and then I’d shimmy myself out of the bed, careful not to jostle her, and I’d go to my own room. I mean, how was I supposed to sleep, two of us crammed into a twin bed, with her rolling around and twitching, that crusty, smelly, drool-soaked teddy bear in my face? How was I supposed to sleep? I had to sleep. I was so tired.

  She didn’t know. She never said anything the next day. On this night, there was a full moon that people would call pretty if they happened to notice it and were the kind of people to have the energy to think about those things. One of my coworkers dropped me off, but the whole drive he stammered about his friend’s near-suicide last spring. “Lucky he took the razor across, not lengthwise,” he said, and I involuntarily glanced at his own wrists, covered by long sleeves, as he stared straight ahead, maybe expecting questions.

  I had found out about Jess’s sister a week ago, and we had talked on the phone once, mostly about the apartment, a whole conversation where Jess didn’t say her sister’s name once. The folder of newspaper clippings was still in its envelope on my dresser. I had accidentally set a glass of water on it, leaving a crinkly circle across my address, blurring the ink. I never liked the girl who sent the clippings; her dorm room smelled like something burned. I didn’t even like her handwriting. Jess might never have told me about Linda if I didn’t get these clippings. I imagined showing up for school, maybe asking how Linda was, and Jess making up a story: “She got accepted to study abroad,” she might have said, sending Linda off to Spain for her senior year of high school. It would have worked. It was possible that Linda might have died and I would never have known. I couldn’t decide if that was sad and, if it was, how sad. Maybe that wouldn’t have been sad at all. I didn’t like imagining Li
nda in her Mazda with her friends, laughing one minute and bloody and mangled the next. All the girls in the car died. I didn’t know why Jess would want this to be a secret. I didn’t know if I should have pretended not to know instead of calling Jess up right away. I wondered if Tommy knew, wondered if he thought about my hair in his hands, wondered who gave him blow jobs when he was bumming around Europe those three weeks with his dad’s credit card. I imagined myself at Linda’s funeral, sitting next to Jess and her parents while an organ played sad hymns. She should have told me. But she didn’t.

  So those were the things I was thinking about when I walked inside that night, with a cardboard box of two drumsticks and four biscuits and a handful of honey packets. My mother thought open bottles of honey attracted ants. I didn’t like honey that much, but it was free to take if no one was watching.

  It wasn’t Grace waiting for me in the kitchen but my father. Like ice knifing deep through my gut to see him slouched in his chair at the head of the table. He was supposed to be asleep.

  I stopped in the doorway. Bright light hammered off the ceiling fixture, a globe shape with a too-bright bulb. “Where is she?” I asked.

  He wore a light blue pajama shirt with a mat of curly dark chest hair overflowing the V. One button didn’t match. Another hung off a loose thread and should be yanked and sewn before it got lost in the laundry. His elbows dug into the table as he shifted his weight. He squinted, surprised I was here.

  “That chicken?” he asked.

  I left the doorway and set the box of chicken on the edge of the table, nudging it toward him. It slid halfway there, but he didn’t reach for the box.

  “Don’t want any,” he said. “Just a question.”

  “Yes, it’s chicken,” I said. “From Kentucky Fried. Where I work fifty hours a week.” In case you didn’t notice, I filled in inside my head. But it was good when he didn’t notice. I didn’t like him noticing now, his eyes roving over my red T-shirt, my shapeless red-and-white-striped smock dotted with blobby grease stains that I had to wash out before my boss yelled at me. Lucky the dumb hat was crushed into my purse.