by JoAnna Novak
Inside each of us, though, a better self resides. Multitudes! Cried the poet. And in the woman, a merry crew of bacchants and maenads munched peanuts. They sent persistent, telepathic, obvious, wobbly messages. Call them naughty thoughts: A little ________ won’t hurt. Everyone deserves a ________. Unwind with a ________.
And the woman told herself: you can always go back to work.
One day, the bacchanalian raged too hard for the woman to ignore. Being pitiable and paltry, she was more susceptible than others—or so she believed—to a tempting noise. She stamped her stony foot. And why shouldn’t she? She had a little ________. After all, she deserved a good ________. So she unwound and unwound and unwound.
Doused and soused, the woman felt like a victim of the Catherine Wheel.
She rapped on her skull. She pulled her hair. She ground her teeth. Bongoed her ribs. Wake up! she hollered. But the maenads and bacchants were face-plant drunk.
A final sad missive reached her: _______ or party alone. The woman did not party alone. She found a closet and did her deed. With each pull, she told herself she was saving her bowels. She was preserving the day’s sanctity. She would emerge from her closet gutted, catharsis complete, a functional filly.
The woman’s madness was not her folly. Her flagrant avoidance of the day’s duties was fine. So too her fun. No, the woman’s foolishness was guilt. She acted on her desires—and then purged herself. A perjury. She lied, listened, reneged.
She expected two fingers to sober her.
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In my boots, my toes say NO. I walk to the Saab, shifting my weight to my heels. This season is so dull: The snow is still falling. The water is still freezing. Now wind lofts it. Now sun melts it. Now it happens again.
The ground I tromp on is steady. It’s fast going, trying to dodge flakes. Whether one landing on your nose is a burden or a joy depends less on the flake and more on one’s mood. I slap something wet from my eyelashes. Winter’s gnats.
I shut myself in the car. I jam the keys in the ignition. Dings ding, a puff of heat. Wait for the engine to warm up, Rolf always says. But how long does one wait? After what period? Has the engine been in hibernation while I’ve been dining? What does exhaust taste like from a cold pipe?
I fold away my fingers. Puking was a two-hand affair, like bilateral breathing. I remember El’s preschool swimming. Left, right, left. Heave, ho. Shift into Drive.
There are the foibles. They talk like kindergarten teachers. Aaaaaannnnnaaa: did you check to see that toilet flushed?
(No. Sorry, dear hostess. Don’t let the pastry chef see the cause of the clog.)
Then there are fricatives. I idle at the edge of The Grove’s lot, flub the number twice. I keep punching the wrong numbers. Anna. Fathead. Fat fingers. Get it together.
“Slow the fuck down,” I say as I speed forward, back to Carousel Garden Road.
I pause at the arboretum’s iron gates. One by one, I press the right buttons to call Rolf. The radio clock reads 3:58. The gray phone feels like a frozen filet against my ear. I turn onto the two-lane highway back into the world.
“Guten Morgen.” I sound like the chef on The Muppets. I watched them with El. I try my lines: “I want you to have custody. Please. I won’t apologize. Better for all.”
But there’s no Rolf, just ringing and ringing: the call takes a lifetime to leapfrog the Atlantic. I imagine his matching mobile, its ribby side panels flashing deep inside his attaché. He’s sleeping, snoring like his daughter, somewhere in the Vienna Ritz, adjacent to the Stadtpark, where statues of Schubert and Strauss collect snow on their marble heads.
Here there’s me. Eyes sort of on some road: white, guardrails, bruising sky. I am heading—back to Cook County? But the professionals have developed. Leftover croissants are being refrozen. Building 13 is shut down for the weekend. Home. I’m going home. That’s what I have. That and El.
“Shit.” Where did 4-a.m.-I-swear-to-be-better-me go? Why can’t I stick with one vow? I need a personal trainer for my morals. I hold the phone out in front of me. I look at it, a new limb I’ve sprouted. I miss the finality of slamming down a handset, screaming into a receiver. Which of these buttons hangs up a call? X or End?
I thumb until the screen blanks.
Behind me, a driver lays on the horn. I look up. The Saab is in the middle of the road, straddling the double-yellow like a tough decision.
“Shit. Sorry!”
I pull over. The car skids over the rumble strips on the shoulder as an Audi accelerates. My head is waterlogged and buoyant. I dial our house.
I am talking. I sound like a patroness: “You have reached Anna, Rolf, and Elliot. Clearly leave a message and a number, and your call will be returned.”
“El, it’s Anna,” I say. Then I hang up. I don’t want to hear a recording of me. This is me, me on the shoulder; me on the machine, I don’t recognize.
I dial the only other number I know by heart. Marky’s phone goes straight to voicemail.
“Talk to the machine,” he says, “Because neither the hand nor the face is available to hear it.”
And here goes real me. She is wonky. Every word like another push on a swing that keeps getting closer and closer to flipping over the top.
“Marky. You’re probably—prep and prep and prep. That’s life, right? One big almost. I’m on the mobile. Remember when we used to tin can through the walls? When you were a kid? Did we do that? Shit. I … it’s better this way. Not having to … seconds to think. Okay. So. Here goes: I love you. Bye bye.”
I roll down the window and fling the phone. I can be cautious. Or not. What matter? I can be myself. I flip my turn signal. Black, black, silver, red: rushing past, a fleet of Benzes. Clear—and I merge.
“Focus,” I say. “You’re drunk. But not so drunk. How much did you absorb? Not so bad. A drink? Maybe a drink. Maybe two. Okay, so you concentrate. Take this slow. Lights on! Hey. There you go. Lights on because of snow.”
My headlights beam into the dusky road. I turn on the radio. Music is waiting. Music will wake me.
What’s playing is a song I remember from grammar school. The Saab rounds a corner and I don’t decelerate. I hold my breath, waiting to skid on two tires. But I don’t. I am stable, bound, accompanied by George Harrison after the Beatles. “What Is My Life.” Up-tempo, tambourine clambering, galloping horns, zigzagging guitar.
It’s one of those songs that has always reminded me why I write: to feel this lofted. I’m in tears I can’t try to control. The volume doesn’t go louder. I bob my head and sing along, imagining this trip home doesn’t need to end. I imagine that this song doesn’t need to end. I imagine that I don’t need to decide between caprice and commitment, that I don’t have to feel bad for being bad, that I won’t keep grading myself. I imagine that, I, too, might write something that moves a woman alone and terrified in her car.
“Fogies at four,” says the deejay. His voice is a slide whistle. “Taking you back to 1971. This one got up to number ten on the charts in the USA. Screw you, Yoko! Bring back our boys!”
“Ass,” I say.
I Seek, Seek, Seek, scanning FM for something listenable. Then I think I hear the phone. Elliot. I turn down the volume.
The sirens blare with blue and red strobes. They are loud. In my ear. I glance at the speedometer. I’m speeding—but not by much. Five over in a fifty.
Pull over, snaps my mother from the passenger seat. Anna, honey, be a good girl and you’ll get a treat, says Marky. Did you wait for the engine to warm up? Rolf asks. And Elliot: Mom, weren’t you supposed to write me a poem?
Rot: Don’t you ever do what you want?
Ahead is the wooden bridge that spans the river. It is small, hardly more than a creek, and frozen solid, argent with ice and mounds of pristine snow. Snow only soils beneath cars. And this tiny bridge, its puny railings wrapped in evergreen garlands, infrequent balusters choked with red velvet bows, the whole construction as old as me, older. I remember my father
driving over this bridge, my mother sucking her ivory kid gloves in the passenger seat, me sliding around the back. Good old whatever before seat belts. Sixty or eighty years ago, before there were McMansions in the suburbs, when goats and ducklings pastured and ponded. Horses. My mother rode. When people built cottages. Siloes and dairies and granaries. This bridge. Rickety enough to off a girl.
There must be gradations of siren: the red and blue blink faster. I take a deep breath. I am not sorry, I think. No mess for El or Rolf. Let me freeze to the river bed. I speed up. The blinker all-clears me for the bridge. Days when life was one lane.
I accelerate up the planks. They bump under me, like driving on popsicle sticks.
“I’m not sorry,” I say. And sharply I turn. I press the gas and grit my teeth and take my hands off the wheel right before the Saab cracks through the railing. I scream, shut my eyes, and wait for my stomach to plunge.
10 ·· ELLIOT
MOST TIMES YOU THINK YOU feel lonely, you’re really not. You just don’t know better, or you’re lazy—like my girls, listening to their rumbling tumblies when they get home from school: Fritos whistle at them, so they forget the baby carrots in the fridge. Loneliness, like bad decisions, is convenient, but usually, you have choices, people to keep you company—even if only your mom.
I was still hunting for a payphone after hoofing it from Ethan’s. The treacherous twenty-minute power-walk had taken me through the suburbs. They were laden with sporadic sidewalks and SUVs, and snow had stung the widest parts of my calves and the backs of my knees, and my fingers had stiffened despite being curled in the deep, fleece-lined pockets of my black down coat, and the brutal windchill had seared the peaks of my face (cheekbones, forehead, nose). There was a dumb, calorie-dense PBJ paperweight in my stomach. I understood how real loneliness could drive a person to abandon all hope.
Real loneliness sapped the joy out of kissing. It was like watching a deflated basketball roll across the court. Real loneliness was the Flu Game—if Michael Jordan hadn’t been able to keep up.
I approached the shady Flagg Creek Motel. I hated myself for stopping. Quitting wasn’t an Egleston trait, but Ethan was right: the cold was lose-a-limb. What if Lisa was that limb? What if, by the time I got to talk to her, she was gone?
The Flagg Creek was next to a florist, a block before Park. Since yesterday, the price of Valentine’s bouquets had risen to $37.99; Georges’ was dark, but, in their window, atop a stout vase, a pink-snouted stuffed bear mooned over me. I walked through the motel parking lot. It was liver-shaped, mostly deserted. If you found yourself here on Friday night, how would you muster the self-respect to face Saturday? I checked back driver’s side windows for decals. Pale green meant Park Faculty/Staff. Teachers, I bet, conducted their Mary Kay Letourneau biz in those nap-rate rooms. If I had to run into anyone, I decided, let it be Señora Lurke. She’d set me up with Courage Under Fire, a mug of sangria, and tell me how to get through life.
Elías. (She’d use my Spanish name.) Obtener a través de esta noche. La vida puede esperar.
I paused at the marled doormat. I feared for myself; I felt like Sidney in Scream, boldly, irresponsibly ignoring danger; hunted but blind to the killer. Only the motel was visible, shaped like a V, sandy bricks and rusty red railings, bereted with snow, strung with silver tinsel, two tiers of balconies. I scanned. I wanted to catch a naked person smoking a cigarette, a woman with a makeup bag filled with hypodermic needles, Lisa’s dad, Rocyo, someone who could entertain me if Anna didn’t pick up.
She would answer, of course. I’d done some Nancy Drewing on the icy walk from Ethan’s and had drawn certain conclusions:
1. If, when I finally got through to Lisa, she wouldn’t talk to me, I was done. Groveling = Loserville. Two guys—Ethan and Lisa’s dad—had kissed me today. I didn’t want an idiot girl who wasn’t paying.
2. Ethan deserved an apology. My abrupt exit was heinous and weak. Saying sorry would give me reason to talk to him again.
3. Real Talk needed to be more like Nonperson. My tips had to be more drastic; the pics, of women sicker than me. If RoHo was right, if Troubaugh was gathering tinder to burn me at the stake, then my clients would get an epic issue.
4. My mom, even if she did dabble, was no heroin junkie. I was so love-crazy for Lisa—did I really miss her or did I just want to win her back, like a crash-diet challenge?—that I couldn’t think of anyone but myself. I was selfish.
I faced the street, my back to the motel. Maybe the Saab was about to pull up, its exhaust panting in the night, one of Anna’s catsuit gloves hovering above the steering wheel in a quick hello. She’d appreciate the setting; it belonged in a seedy, modern Canterbury Tales. But the night was empty.
I hugged my mini backpack to my stomach. I checked: my ribs were still there. The envelope of cash was still there. If the motel didn’t have a payphone, I would use a room phone: I could afford a whole weekend of nap-rates with the profits from my clients.
··
The lobby was a stew of classy and trashy. There were pamphlets for a Ghosts of Cook County tour that promised to reveal Resurrection Mary. There were lamps with stained-glass shades; the shards formed the Chicago Bears logo. Blue, white, orange light streaked the aisle leading to the front desk. On TV, a toad-green Marge Simpson flew across a gloaming sky on a broomstick, cape and beehive streaming behind her. I checked the corners: no payphone.
“You waitin’ on the moms, honey?” The woman behind the desk stood. Her earrings were Bugs Bunny and her necklace was a foot-long crucifix. When she closed her mouth, she was one big overbite. “We’re quiet here at this time-being, but you’re welcome to get cozy in the front room. Storm of the millennium out there, said Jerry Taft. I was at the Jewel this morning, and they were cleaned outta bread. Three days of this, someone said.”
“It’s whatever. Not so bad.” I peered over the counter. A pair of zebra-furred flip-flops sat on the floor underneath a swivel chair. On the desk, a facedown Gameboy beeped the Mario theme. “Um, by any chance, is there a phone I could use?”
The woman pointed a skinny finger wearing Tweety Bird toward a slab of silver on the wall. Red wires shot out from the metal, punched with tiny holes that formed the shape of a phone. There was a sticker, slashed in half, that was supposed to say “1-800-COLLECT.”
She frowned. “Y2K.”
“Oh.” I paused, staring. The former payphone reminded me of a picture I’d seen in a book about tabloids (Jayne Mansfield’s head on a dashboard) and a term Anna had taught me (mise en abyme). “Can you make local calls in the rooms?”
“Shame. I have a mobile, if you wanna. I never use all my minutes.”
“No, I can’t … But thank you very much. How much for, like, a … studio?”
I didn’t need more than the icky green room Anna and I’d shared in Soho. Suddenly I was exhausted. Shivering my butt off on another hike, only to come home to an empty house and a Lean Cuisine sounded depressing. If I was going to steep in solitude, I wanted to do it entirely, eerily alone.
“My mom’s gonna meet me, so I could … call her. Tell her I got here safe. I don’t wanna miss Boy Meets World.”
“There’s the hourly and the overnight. If you’re—”
“Overnight.”
“$79.49, plus tax.”
I unsnapped the top flap of my backpack and uncinched the drawstring. “May I use cash?” I put on a syrupy voice and started peeling out fives and tens. “That way, my mom’s all set!”
“Honey, you pay however you want. Money’s money. You sign this register and you’re all set. Angel.” Nimbly, the woman arched an eyebrow. “Can you tell the Big Guy upstairs to send me a daughter as thoughtful as you?”
··
If I died, it wouldn’t be so awful. Michael Jordan’s birthday was the seventeenth of February, so room 217 portended well. Between the time I expired and a maid found my body, I’d probably burn off that PBJ. The image of Ethan’s peen would become any gross thing,
like Rocyo’s butt crack or Terrible Twos. Maybe there was a God, a Big Guy who’d grant me access to afterlife consciousness, who’d let me know how much my corpse weighed at the autopsy.
I was trying to stay plucky. The room was gross. The bed was narrow and covered with a comforter the color of roast beef; the headboard was a gallows that felt like the flimsy balsam wood we used in IA to build models. Gashes in the TV tube suggested victimization by tire iron. Everything smelled as if Binaca had been used to mask an eternal belch.
I set my backpack on the nightstand and sat down on the bed. There was a tilde of blood on the threadbare white pillowcase. I flipped it over and dialed my house.
“You have reached Anna, Rolf, and Elliot. Clearly leave a message and a number, and your call will be returned.”
I thought about hanging up. I could try again later; after all, I’d paid for a full night. But I was so exhausted, my shoulders felt like they were harnessed to anchors, like I was being pulled across a million leagues of ocean. I might sleep a year. If I turned on the TV and dozed off, I didn’t want my mom worrying. I didn’t want her to think I was running away from her—or encoring my self-mutilation with the emo-cliché of running away from myself. For the first time since getting flaca, I was letting life happen. Here I was, finally not being a child. This is how people orgasmed, without overthinking. Today at least boded well for my avocado prospects: I’d stumbled into these drugs, this excursion, this afternoon, this evening.
“Anna, it’s me.” I twisted the curly black cord of the phone around my index finger until the visible flesh reddened, an isosceles triangle. “I was working on that same project with the girl from yesterday. Yah know, in Ridgedale? I thought I’d walk home, which, in retrospect … way stupid. But, anyhow, I stopped because I was literally freezing. So I’m at the Flagg Creek Motel. It’s not so … well, it’s fine. I’m in room 217. Um. Yeah. You should pick me up. It’s too cold to walk. Okay. Love you.”
I yanked off my boots and kicked them toward the wall. Other Elliots had been cavalier; there was a rainbow of gray-black scuffs.