Silver Girl

by Leslie Pietrzyk

  Then I said, “I can move out, though actually I’m paid up on rent for the month.”

  There were more names. More howls. Jess was dramatic and noisy, and she threw the glass, which shattered into a million crazy pieces I would sweep up later with the broom Jess had bought.

  I said, “You knew what I was doing. You had to. I mean, you’re not stupid. You told him where I studied in the library that one night last year. You told him to find me.”

  She called me the sickest person she had ever met. She told me to leave by the weekend. She told me my name wasn’t on the lease. She told me not being on the lease was like not existing. She told me I was dead to her for the rest of her life. She waved her arms around and paced. She grabbed another glass off the dish rack and threw that, too, a clean one, which was a shame. Why not a dirty one from the sink? I thought. She told me that it was going to be like I had never even been here.

  There was more. A lot more. I let her yell. It felt good. It felt as good as I had imagined. She told me I’d betrayed her. She called me Pontius Pilate, though I think she meant Judas, and she yelled when I corrected her.

  The upstairs people banged on the floor to shut us up. That’s when Jess left. She told me to get out before tomorrow at five, that she was changing all the locks. I asked her about the rent money and she said, “Fuck you and your rent money.”

  She left.

  Jess was gone.

  I cleaned up the mess. I mean, why not? I’d cleaned up lots of broken glass before. It wasn’t any big thing to sweep up glass afterward. I felt nothing. I felt oddly calm, calm for real. This was all over. Everything was over, and that calm was everywhere, like fog, like vapor. I felt like the smooth, silvery surface of a mirror.

  She said she had never known me. Well, she knew me now. She knew me now, I thought, letting water run over the last paper towel on the roll so I could dab up any splinters of glass the broom missed along the baseboard. Those tiny, glittery shards were dangerous.

  She knew me now, I thought again and again, over and over, like song lyrics I couldn’t shake or finish.

  Because I’d gotten immune to those four words echoing in my head, it was a surprise, later, in the middle of the night, in the middle of not-sleeping, in the middle of crunching down a handful of baby aspirin, to realize the powerful truth of them, that yes, Jess for sure knew me now. In the middle of the night, not-asleep, I understood that now she saw me for who I was. Now she hated me, just like all the rest of them did. I wondered why that was what I wanted, and in that instant the calm shattered, a tremendous rock hitting the surface of my silent pond. The truth, I saw then in the dark, was that what I had lost was everything. And what the “everything” actually was, it was, well, everything. She had seen me with her own clear eyes, all along, and she had loved me. What she had seen was who I wanted to be, who I hoped I truly maybe possibly was or at least could be. Normal, like everyone else. Her friend. Not that other person, that monster.

  Strategies for Survival #1: Numb

  (winter, junior year)

  The winters I remember in Chicago had a specific dark and endless quality, as if distilled to some deeper, purer essence than the winters in Iowa, though it was cold and snowy back there, too. In Chicago, the snow came and wouldn’t leave, only accumulated, until the concept of “white” was a thing to loathe. The low gray of every day’s same sky; slush ribboning the streets, piling up along the curbs, and the smacking sound of tires rolling through the mass of it; the scrape of shovels battering against cement; the piercing chafe of snot inhaled back up into a raw red nose; circling fingers full of Vaseline into salt-stained dress boots, massaging mink oil into shoes for waterproofing and stainproofing, the greasy rank scent, the fluttery questions, best ignored, about what mink oil really was, where it might come from; the flick of Kleenex popping when pulled out of a box one after the other; sniffles ricocheting across the library stacks, the distracting echo of that, rereading the same first paragraph over and over, highlighter pen clenched between fingers and thumb, uncomprehending; hat-mashed hair and chapped lips and hangnails catching inside gloves and dry skin, flaky skin, lifeless skin; sparks of static electricity snapping off doorknobs; the heavy, dull food of the cafeteria, brown meat, white potatoes, tinny-tasting green beans with the texture of mush, noodles and more noodles and more noodles; the radio DJs and newscasters and their damn positivity, the manic cry “Good morning!”; crunching across snow; seeing a girl in a red scarf slip and fall on ice across the street as people streamed around her, late for class. And the wind. The wind, the wind. That Chicago wind.

  Possibly it was different for people living in the city itself; possibly winter amid glittering glass buildings felt different from our winter up in Evanston. Though Chicago was an easy el ride, we stayed locked in the library all winter, studying endlessly for the good grades that would sail us into grad school, med school, law school, business school.

  I didn’t want to go to any of those places, but I was accustomed to compliance, so I locked myself in the library like everyone else. Winter quarter was the only time I got all A’s. Winter quarter was when we learned “existential crisis” in philosophy and “major depressive disorder” in psych; when we contemplated our doughy, abject bodies taking up space in the shower and found them inadequate; when whatever we most wanted to avoid—that guy, her, no job offer, Moby-Dick, whatever shit we hauled here from back home, the professor’s red pen and mocking gaze, a missed period—ambushed each of us from within the shadowy dark.

  To cope, we punished ourselves. This was when we took on the bears: tough classes, tedious requirements outside our interests, the eight o’clocks. The thinking was, nothing to do but study, so grind away. The thinking was, if your roommate committed suicide, they’d award you pity A’s, and if you were the one committing suicide, at least you’d escape winter (we assumed; possibly we were already in hell). The thinking was, there had never been a year when spring didn’t eventually show up, but just as we couldn’t really believe that rumor about a roommate’s suicide boosting our GPAs, we couldn’t believe in spring either. It was something we remembered hearing about, once at a party, from a drunk guy with shit for brains. We didn’t believe it. It was hard to believe in anything during those winters.

  Lake Michigan was too vast to freeze like a pond, but the waves crashing on the sandy beach piled up and froze into thick, rugged layers of uneven ice, stretching out into the lake. One winter in particular I often stood at a certain window on the fifth floor of the library and stared at those frozen waves. I had moved back to the dorms, to a single in what we called Suicide Hall, though it was actually named after an alum who had donated money, as were all the buildings. Jess had a new roommate in the apartment, some theater major from Indiana called Molly.

  Sundays were the worst: reading and papers due Monday, none started; lingering regrets from any parties scrounged up the night before; a hangover hammering across the afternoon; pulling on the last pair of clean underwear; the usual problem of no dorm food served Sundays. I was thinking about these things around three P.M., staring out this window at the frozen lake. I could order a small pizza or trudge into town to Burger King. I could shake out the pockets of my backpack to see if a five-dollar bill might magically appear. I could buy M&M’S from the vending machine and bull through, an expression I wanted to shake but couldn’t.

  Instead, I tugged on my boots; got into my coat, hat, scarf, mittens; left History of England, 1066–1660 flipped open spine up so no one would steal my carrel space; and walked to the lake.

  Footprints crisscrossed the snow on the beach, but no one else was out right then. The wind swooped in off the lake, so hard I imagined I could see the curve of it. The hawk wind, they called it. Like being grabbed, like talons. The name was right. Ten degrees? Less? Certainly not more. And wind chill. Even with my scarf pulled up unattractively to just under my eyes, my face went numb. My breath came out wet, and the scarf stiffened. My eyes watered. I shoved
my hands in my pockets. I thought I would stand here, looking out for a minute or two, then go back before freezing to death. I couldn’t see the open water from where I stood on the snow layering the ice layering the sand, all of it layering the beach. Forgotten words: “Beach.” “Sun.” “Jess.” All there was was gray, and gray was all there was: frigid waves, sky, the lake beyond. Through my hat, listening to the muffled pull and roar of the gray waves, a gray sound.

  Afternoon, technically, but the landscape was infused with the quality of twilight where nothing felt exact.

  The ice looked thick enough to walk on. How could it not be? The frozen waves were more than six feet tall as I clambered up them, rising off the snow-covered beach. I told myself this was safe. If it weren’t safe someone would have posted a warning sign. If it weren’t safe, I wouldn’t do this.

  No one knew where I was.

  It hurt to breathe. The wind knifed my silly winter coat and the sweater underneath. The surface of the frozen waves tilted and skewed, crunchy here and slippery there. I moved slowly. Swaths were streaked with sand and dirt dredged up from the bottom of the lake; areas were rough and areas were smooth. I thought of the texture of an unshaven face. Always the churn of more waves, flung up against the wall of ice, again and again.

  I was walking on top of the lake. I was standing on waves.

  The air thickened. Maybe I was shivering. My boots felt heavier to lift, my feet transformed like marble. I was desperately cold. Still, I trudged out, away from the beach, away from campus where people were clicking on desk lamps and reaching for the phone for delivery, something for dinner. The seagulls were somewhere else, the alewives gone. Under the sound of the fresh waves pushing forward, I felt an uncomfortable silence. I wondered if anyone was looking out a window, if anyone saw me right now.

  There was an edge. There was an edge where I could stand and finally see the murky water below me, that edge where waves were neither water nor ice, and chunks of them slopped and sloshed into white foam. I stood there and watched, feeling the sky shift two more notches closer to darkness. As cold as the air was, the water would feel colder.

  There was no one to warn that I might fall in, that the ice might not hold, that I might slip and break my leg, that I shouldn’t be thinking what I was almost thinking.

  Would Jess come to my funeral? I wondered.

  I thought about Linda facing this same choice, maybe, and the sad, silent wreckage she left behind, and I wondered what we could have said to her. And Jess with a different choice, also a hard one: Choosing to love Penny. Choosing Penny. Choosing love.

  And me.

  People in books could escape, men in books could hit the road; escape for them was hopping on a raft, or jumping in the car and revving the engine and disappearing into the night. But girls, or girls like me anyway, we looked back.

  I loved Jess for her generous, crazy self and because she chose me when I longed to feel chosen; but also, mostly, truthfully, I loved her because I thought she saw the person I ached to be, the girl free from a past. She saw the me I created. Maybe she could have seen more if I hadn’t been afraid. Maybe all of this, each word, was true for the both of us.

  I left my sister behind. Abandoned her. I didn’t have a choice, I’d explained to myself over and over. I had imagined saving her plenty of times, the pillow over our father’s stupid sleeping face, a crazy and grand gesture, like the last chapter of an Agatha Christie novel... voilà!

  Say it again. I left my sister behind. She was the one who knew the real me and my dark confusion and fumbling, who suffered because of my failures, and what did she do when confronted with that? Grace loved me anyway. I left because I thought I had to save myself. I left because I couldn’t save her. But looking down into that black water, I saw what was true: that my sister would be the one saving me.

  I turned around. The wind was easier against my back, almost forgiving when I wasn’t fighting it.

  Back at the library, I knew I never would have jumped. Easy to think, back at the library.

  When I got to my dorm room later that night, I heard the phone ringing through the door. It was a stupid expense to have my own phone when no one called me and I called no one, but also it seemed like something you just do, have a phone and a phone number. Maybe someone would call me someday, I had thought. Anyway, now someone was.

  My fingers were stiff from being out in the cold, sort of half frozen, and I fumbled the key, racing to unlock the door, and my book bag crashed down my shoulder onto my elbow, sending my arm askew. The phone kept ringing, though each ring felt like the last. I wasn’t used to this lock, which turned right instead of left, like where I lived with Jess. Ringing, ringing, and my mind clicked into place as the key did: it was Jess. I pushed the door open, flicked the light switch. No one else would call me. That’s who the phone had been for all along. Understanding this was like suddenly being able to feel warm blood surge through my own body.

  My single room had no decoration, which is exactly how I liked things now. About the only thing to see was books lined up. A desk lamp. Everything else went in a drawer or the closet. I dropped my book bag onto my empty desk, next to the phone.

  The phone was black. A pretty color didn’t cost extra, but a phone you didn’t expect to use much should be black, I thought.

  I watched it ring.

  Did I want to talk to her? My bones, my insides, still felt hollowed out from the cold at the lake. I had another chapter to go over before my test in English history. I wanted to concentrate on planning the long, maybe winding trail of phone calls from this black phone that would begin tomorrow as I started doing what I had to for Grace.

  I lifted the phone receiver to my ear; it felt oddly heavy. “Hello?” I said. I assumed she’d hang up. That had happened when I first got the phone, that someone would call and I’d pick it up and no one would be there. “Hello?” I said again. I heard breathing. Someone was there. I knew she was there. “Jess?” I said.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi,” I said right back, that same old habit of mirroring her words.

  She said, “It’s Linda’s birthday today.”

  I remembered that phone call after I read the newspaper articles saying Linda died. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say, and Jess said things I didn’t expect, and there was no plan for the way to feel better.

  “How old is she?” I asked.

  “Seventeen,” she said. “Jesus. I lost my virginity when I was seventeen. That feels like forever ago. Everything feels like forever ago.”

  I slid my key ring into the outer pocket of my book bag because that’s where I always kept it now. “Yeah,” I said. “I hate when things feel like forever ago, especially if it’s really only a few years. How does that happen?”

  She said, “I wish I liked her more. I was always so jealous of her.”

  “You did like her,” I said. “Inside, you loved her. You know that.” I sat on the bed and twisted the black phone cord, tightly entwining one finger into its rubbery spirals.

  “She just seemed deeper than I was, more important. Like the way she looked at the world, the things she said. You’d never believe she was a kid, with what she was thinking. Like once she told my mother a house was a container for people.”

  A brief whoosh came from her end of the line, maybe from opening the refrigerator. I imagined that cold light washing over her face, the kitchen table in the shadows, dishes stacked in the drainer, and I had to stop.

  Jess said, “I was jealous of you, too, you know.”

  This was like the key clicking in the door, something swinging wide open. That she could feel that. I said, “That’s crazy.”

  “It’s all crazy,” she said. “Penny says hi.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, she would if she knew I was on the phone,” Jess said.

  “Tell her I’m a Cubs fan now thanks to her.”

  “She’s making all of us into Cubs fans,” Jess said. “My d
ad’s getting tickets for Opening Day this year, in the spring.”

  The spring, I thought, just as Jess said, “I wish it was spring right now.”

  The tip of my finger had turned purple red. “Spring will be here before we know it.”

  “I hate when people say that. So fake.”

  “Me too.”

  Just like those early days in the dorm room freshman year, sitting side by side on her bed, ideas and thoughts and words spilling out in torrents, each of us soaking it all up.

  I said, “I don’t think there’s anything to say that will ever make you feel right about Linda. If there is, I don’t know what it is.”

  “Try,” Jess whispered. “Please just try.” She sniffled. I wanted to cry, too. It was only luck that I hadn’t lost my own sister. The purest kind of lucky luck that won’t go on forever. Grace. Thinking her name calmed me the same way taking in a deep breath did.

  I wanted to say something important, something that could be written in a book, in a poem. I pulled off my hat, dropped it on the neatly made bed. This room could be in a brochure, it so lacked personality. Not even any trash in the trash can because I emptied it every day. I didn’t want anything unnecessary in here. I didn’t want accumulation.

  “Jess,” I said.

  “I’ve always liked the way you say my name,” she said. “Like the S’s are softer or something in your voice. Say it again.”

  “Jess,” I said. I thought I might cry, but not yet.

  She was. I imagined her wiping away tears that way she did, sliding both index fingers along the bottom rims of her eyes to sop up runny mascara.

  Jess said, “I hate the winter here. It’s so cold. It’s a goddamn deep freeze.”

  I said, “Everyone hates the winter. Only idiots like winter.”

  “With the world filled with idiots,” she said, “I guess there are plenty of people liking winter.”

  I knew what she was doing because I was doing it, too. She was making jokes because she felt so awful. Because talking about winter filled space and time. Because to lose a sister must be the worst thing in the world.