Dark Rooms

by Lili Anolik

  I was trying to decide how best to avoid him, taking an inventory of my options: shove my head all the way inside the mouth of the mailbox, duck behind my dad’s car or the Wheelers’ hedges, run back into the house. Just then, though, Jamie looked up and our eyes met. Oh shit, I thought. Oh, who cares? I thought.

  I waited for him to reach me. At last he did.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said. “How are you?”

  “Good. You?”

  “Good.”

  It was his turn to speak, only he couldn’t seem to think of anything to say. I watched him struggle. He was nice to watch, tall and fair and slender with the kind of delicate, crystalline beauty teenage boys almost invariably grow out of, lose by the time they become men: high cheekbones, flower-petal skin, full lips, intensely red, the borders blurry and undefined. It was funny; it used to be the sheer privilege of talking to him made talking nearly impossible, left me tongue-tied and breathless with nerves, terrified that I wouldn’t be able to hold his interest, while he looked on with those eyes that always seemed on the verge of sleep. Now he was the one who was anxious, and I was the one who didn’t give a shit.

  Finally, to help him out, I said, “So, are you on your way to the courts?”

  He nodded, grateful. “Well, first I’m on my way to the track to do some foot speed drills, then I’m on my way to the courts.”

  “Lesson?”

  “Lesson, then a practice match. I’ve been training a lot lately.”

  I wasn’t surprised to hear it. As a student Jamie was solid, nothing special, but his squash had been good enough to get him into Cornell and Middlebury. Not quite good enough, though, to get him into Princeton, his dad’s alma mater. When he received his rejection letter in early spring, he decided to do a postgraduate year at Chandler, spend the next six months concentrating on upping his ranking, then reapply in the fall.

  “Is the lesson with Mr. Loring or Oscar?” I asked. Mr. Loring was the coach of the Chandler squash team. Oscar was Jamie’s private coach.

  “Oscar,” he said. And then, softly, “Geez, can’t someone get that kid to mellow out?”

  I noticed, for the first time, that a baby was crying. Guess Mrs. Wheeler had had her little boy. “I thought Oscar taught out of that club in Canton?” I said.

  “He does.”

  “Then how come the lesson’s not there?”

  “Because they’re repainting the courts this week. Actually, just one of the courts. But reserving the other is, like, this major hassle, so—”

  I tuned out, letting him pull the weight of the conversation for a bit. It was hard for me to believe how close we’d once been. When Nica dumped Jamie back in February and nobody knew why, not even him, he’d started calling me, nearly every night on my cell. These conversations weren’t a secret, not exactly. I hadn’t mentioned them to Nica, though. And if he ever had, she would’ve reacted, I knew, with wounded surprise. “What’s up with not telling me?” she’d have asked, to which I’d have said—I’d scripted my reply, rehearsed it in my head many times, the casualness of my delivery, the tone of my voice jaunty and absentminded by turns—“I didn’t? Really? Huh. I thought I did.” Technically I hadn’t been doing anything wrong. Nothing remotely romantic or flirtatious was going on in those dialogues. Mostly I’d listened as Jamie went on about how confused he was by the way my sister had ended the relationship, how wrecked that she’d left him, how much he loved her still. But if the interactions truly had been so innocent, I wouldn’t have kept them from her. And I remembered that during that period, when she and I were talking or hanging out, there’d sometimes be a pause and I’d feel a tickling sensation—of guilt or excitement, possibly both—at the back of my throat.

  I tuned back in. Jamie had finally loosened up, was going on about tomorrow night’s Fourth party becoming an annual thing (his parents spent every July in a villa outside Florence and, as of last summer, no longer insisted on taking him with them, good squash courts, coaches, and hitting partners being tough to reliably find in rural Italy), how many kegs he had on order, who was bringing what weed from which county in Northern California. While I waited for him to stop talking, I touched my lips experimentally with the tips of my fingers, the flesh there so dehydrated it felt like dried sponge. I began to think about how I hadn’t slept much in the past few days because I’d run out of pills, and how nice it would be to place a couple under my tongue, let them dissolve, drip slowly down my throat, then curl up in bed, burrow deep into those sheets I hadn’t changed in weeks, and just drift off.

  “So, anyway, you should stop by,” he said, caught up in his enthusiasm, and then, remembering who he was speaking to, got a look on his face like he wished he could snatch his words out of the air, shove them back in his mouth.

  He visibly relaxed, though, when I said, “I definitely will,” which we both knew meant I definitely wouldn’t.

  “Cool,” he said. “Cool, cool, cool.”

  And then we fell into a silence, this time agitated on my end. Thinking about the pills had made me want the pills. I was almost desperate now to be alone with them. And because he showed no signs of moving on, was, in fact, zoned out, tapping the beat to some song playing in his head against his collarbones, I knew that I’d have to prompt him.

  “So,” I said, “you should probably get going, right?” Then, realizing how that sounded, “I mean, I wouldn’t want to make you late or anything.”

  Jamie, getting the message, nodded. We said our good-byes, went our separate ways: him to fresh air and sunshine, me to my musty bedroom and drawn shades. And that, I thought, was that.

  Except it wasn’t.

  I had no interest in going to the party. I had no intention of going to the party. And yet I went to the party. Why? When I say I don’t have a clue, I’m being literal, not flip. The drugs I loved so much, the ones I was now frankly and unambiguously abusing, didn’t just cut me off from other people, but from myself, as well. My mind and body were totally disconnected. Even physical sensations felt distant and not quite real. Sometimes I’d be smearing gloss on my lips, and the information coming from my fingertips would directly contradict the information coming from my brain, insisting that the warm, smooth skin and the hard ridges of teeth underneath belonged to a person other than me.

  All of which is to say my motives were a mystery. I can’t fathom why I did something so inexplicable and ugly as showing up at a party where I wasn’t wanted. And that wasn’t even the most inexplicable and ugly thing I did that night. No, the most inexplicable and ugly thing I did that night was dressing head to toe in my dead sister’s clothes, the very ones she’d worn the year before.

  It was as if I was sleepwalking. I entered Nica’s room, walked over to her closet, pulled out the items I was looking for one by one. I changed into them, then tucked my blond hair under a dark wig I had from an old costume. (The Halloween before last, Nica, Maddie, and I had gone as the original Charlie’s Angels: Nica as Farrah Fawcett, Maddie as Kate Jackson, me as Jaclyn Smith.) Stepping into the bathroom that Nica and I had shared, I opened the medicine cabinet door, removed the bottle of perfume Mom had mixed for her at a fragrance shop in Martha’s Vineyard. After dabbing a bit of the liquid—a blend of blood-orange oil and vanilla-bouquet oil, an unexpected scent, both sharp and sweet, rough and tender—on my neck, behind my ears, I shut the medicine cabinet door.

  Looking back at me in the toothpaste-flecked mirror was a reflection so like Nica’s it shocked my heart, stopped it cold for a second or two. The resemblance between us had always been strong, closer to that of twins than sisters. Only our coloring was different. But no, not only our coloring, something deeper, something under the skin, something in our spirits or our souls was different, as well; so that, finally, even though we looked exactly alike, we looked nothing alike. She was beautiful and I wasn’t. Or maybe I was but nobody, me included, could see it.

  The differences, though, whatever they were, were di
sappearing right before my eyes. I tried to focus on my image, hold it steady, but it kept slipping, Nica’s falling into its place. And then behind Nica’s image came something else, a memory. I shut my eyes to ward it off, only shutting my eyes didn’t work. It simply played out on the inside of my skull:

  There we were, the two of us, Nica and I, getting ready for this party one year ago. My jeans were in the dryer so I was in a T-shirt and shorts, lying in the bathtub, a cushion from the downstairs couch behind my back, keeping Nica company. She was moisturizing her legs, chain-smoking, and talking to me all at the same time. When she finished massaging lotion into her calves, she looked for a towel, couldn’t find one, pushed up my shirt, wiped the excess on my stomach. Then she tossed her cigarette out the window, flipped her hair upside down. Through the dipping V-neck of her thin cotton sweater I could see her bouncing breasts in a black lace bra, and I wondered where she got it, when exactly she’d switched from the plain beige ones with the tiny pink flowers in the middle to the kind I thought only adult women wore.

  It was a fledgling memory, not fully formed—a fragment. Still, it made me want to bash my head against the medicine cabinet until it fell out. Instead, I washed down a couple generic Xanaxs with tap water, then a couple more. After removing the chalky white pill residue from the corners of my lips, I grabbed my bag. I made certain not to look in the mirror again before walking out the door.

  Over the years, I’d been to the houses of a number of classmates and some, though not many, were bigger than Jamie’s. But his was, to me, the most beautiful by far, the way its physical splendor was touched, just slightly, by decay—the gables and turrets faded and weather-eaten, the brick of the chimney worn to a dull brown, the wood of the boxed gutters starting to splinter—giving it a kind of grandeur, a majesty. It was set back from the rest of the street, nestled into the side of a hill.

  The driveway was long and serpentine and sharply graded, and I knew if I parked in it, a fast exit would be impossible, so I left my car at the end of the block. I found the gravel path at the edge of the property. I began to follow it. The gravel was slippery, and each time I looked down to see where I was stepping, I’d get a small shock, the sight of my legs and feet in the high-heeled shoes I’d never worn before striking me as altogether alien, as if I were sharing my body with another person.

  At last I came to the end of the gravel path. Instead of heading to the front door as everybody else was, though, I continued on a different path, this one running along the side of the house and still ascending, if not as steeply. I passed the garage where the Amorys’ cars slept, the toolshed, the box hedge, the garden with the jonquils and the daylilies, the sundial at the center, pausing at a door. I pressed down on the latch, expecting resistance but finding none.

  As soon as I was inside, I moved away from the party sounds, the voices and the music and the laughter, slipping through the line of chairs meant to serve as an informal barrier to the back of the house, down the hall, beyond the dining room with the Queen Anne drop-leaf table, the billiards room with the odd-shaped alcoves, the library with the shelves that went all the way up to the ceiling, the conservatory, a room I used to think only existed in the game Clue. Finally I reached the maid’s stairs. At the top was Mr. Amory’s study: lots of dark wood and leather furniture, a well-stocked liquor cabinet and a stuffed elk’s head, a set of glass-paneled doors that looked more like a set of glass-paneled windows and gazed out onto the pool that had been installed over Mrs. Amory’s objections. The rest of the rooms on the second floor—bedrooms, mostly—would be in high demand later tonight, but not now; it wasn’t late enough for coupling off. And I didn’t see a single person as I crossed from the rear of the house to the front.

  I arrived at the main staircase, grand and twisting and ornately carved. For a long time I stood there, surveying the scene below. The lights in the front hall and living room were dim, the furniture pushed to the side to make way for three aluminum kegs and a massive pair of speakers, pumping out an old Rolling Stones song. Chandler liked to say its students hailed from around the globe, and they did. Mostly, though, they hailed from Boston and New York. Jamie’s hometown of Avon was exactly two hours from both cities—a nothing drive. And the place was already packed, people dancing and talking, drinking beer from translucent cups, taking jerky hits off sloppily wrapped joints.

  I began fumbling along the wall with my hand. At last I found the light switch. My heart fluttered in my chest, a giggle slipped from my mouth, and thinking to myself, What fun, I flipped it. Immediately all activity stopped. Everyone looked up, dazed and blinking. I waited for the laughter that would follow as soon as their vision adjusted. But nobody laughed. Nobody even moved. They stared up at me, eyes all the way open, as if someone had put a cold fingertip to the backs of their necks. And then Maddie uttered a small cry, brought her hand to her mouth. I placed my palm on the banister, started down the stairs.

  “Happy Independence Day, Slim Jim,” I sang out. Nica called Jamie Slim Jim, Nica and no one else.

  Jamie stood there, plastic beer cup in his hand, his face pale under its tan and covered in sweat. He swallowed, or tried to, the muscles knotting in his throat. I watched Ruben go up to him, say something, but he pushed Ruben aside, moved swiftly to the stairs, his eyes never leaving mine. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” His voice was harsh, strange. I could see the whites on all four sides of his eyes. Sexy, sleepy, stoned Jamie—mad.

  I was unable to speak, only to look.

  He dropped his cup, grabbed my arm. I could feel the pressure of each individual finger digging into my flesh. “I said, what do you think you’re doing?”

  I was frightened, but I knew instinctively that I couldn’t show it. I had to bluff, make him back off. I blinked several times in rapid succession, jammed down the corners of my mouth. And then, in the coolest tone I could manage, I said, “You’re breaking my arm. Let go.”

  To my surprise he did. To my even greater surprise I saw that beneath his anger was fear. And in that instant I understood how disturbed what I’d done really was, how sick, how fucked up. Jamie was scared of me, me. I brushed past him, walked over to the kegs, drew myself a cup. I drank it down as everybody watched. I drew myself another. Drank that one down, too.

  After a bit, someone hit the light switch, plunging the downstairs back into darkness. Then a different someone turned up the volume on the stereo. And, slowly, the party started up again.

  I should have left at that point. I’d gone to make a scene, I’d made a scene. Mission accomplished. I stayed, though. I’m not sure why. Maybe to punish myself. Sticking around certainly caused me misery. I’d been banished in spirit if not fact from the party, and wandering through it I felt beyond isolated, near wild with loneliness. It was almost as if I was wearing Nica’s magnetism the same way I was wearing her clothes, only I’d put it on inside out: I repelled people. I’d take one step toward them, they’d take two back from me. Or maybe I stayed in the hopes I could make Jamie forgive me.

  The self-consciousness I was feeling was unbearable. What I needed to do was get away from myself, and the beer wouldn’t let me. Not fast enough, anyway. I found a bottle with a couple inches of vodka in it sitting, abandoned, on the piano stool. I gagged as I tipped its contents down my throat, swallowing as quickly as the suction allowed. It was like drinking gasoline. But I did it, again and again, until the bottle was empty. And soon it was as if the different parts and functions of my brain were scrambled and mashed together so that hearing was jumbled up with seeing and seeing with tasting and tasting with smelling and my thoughts were mixed up with all this, too, so that I couldn’t tell what went where.

  My cheeks and neck and lips were hot, burning up. I considered losing the wig. I didn’t, though. Remembering Mr. Amory’s liquor cabinet, I decided to cool down with another drink instead. I was having a tough time walking, so I made my way to the back of the house by holding on to the furniture, one hand over the othe
r. But even being careful, I tripped—on a curled edge of carpet, I think, or maybe my own feet—and went crashing into the row of chairs. Distantly I observed the blood from the gash in my knee pooling in my shoe, the funny angle my wrist was bent at. Finally I picked myself up, climbed the stairs, reached the study. That’s when I passed the French doors and saw Nica.

  A few minutes later I was bleeding all over my reflection in the pool, gauzy with pain and confusion.

  A light came on.

  A voice called my name.

  Who did the voice belong to? I don’t know. The scene ends there in my memory. A movie stopped mid-reel.

  I woke up the next morning. It wasn’t quite dawn yet, the air suffused with the dull glow that comes just before first light. I reached groggily for my swivel-neck lamp, grasping at empty space until I realized that my lamp wasn’t there because I wasn’t home. Bolting upright, I flung my gaze around the room that wasn’t mine. Nothing offered the barest hint as to where I was. And for a few bug-eyed seconds I wondered if I was dead. Then I remembered. I was at Jamie’s. I remembered other things, too.

  Slowly I eased myself back down onto the pillow, became very still. To move even a muscle was to stir up another hideous memory from the night before. They arrived anyway, though, in wave after scalding wave. Finally, all the waves had broken over me, and I lay there cringing in shame.

  But I couldn’t cringe for long because something was tugging at my attention, impatient and demanding a response: pain. I was in a lot of it. My hand, in particular, the one I’d used to break my spill over the chairs. I held it up to my eyes. It looked like a rubber glove filled with water, not a knuckle in sight. I touched my face. It felt soft, shapeless, pummeled. There was a ridged scab above my eyebrow, and a lump as big as a walnut above that, and my upper lip was twice its normal size. The shoulder that had hit the ground first ached. So did the hipbone. So did the knee.