Motherest

by Kristen Iskandrian

  “Oh, hi,” I say.

  “Hey, Agnes. I saw your name on the sign-in sheet.”

  I move my bag from one shoulder to the other, for something to do. “Are you waiting for anyone else? Is everyone gone?”

  “Technically I’m supposed to check all the rooms. But everyone who signed in has signed out, so I’m going to leave it at that.”

  “I haven’t signed out.”

  Joan laughs. “That’s okay. I can see you’re leaving.”

  I imagine being locked in. I imagine walking by and hearing someone else who got locked in, someone playing the piano at some illicit hour. I don’t know if I’d rather be the one playing or the one listening.

  Joan opens the door for me and follows me out. I watch her lock it in three places and test it to make sure, pushing and pulling as though she were trying to break in.

  “Well, if there is anyone in there,” she says, “they’re definitely not getting out tonight.” She laughs again—nervousness?—and tosses the keys in her messy bag. “I always tend to do at least half my job really well.”

  It feels too late to ask her name. Too late in the day and too late in our affiliation. We walk together for a few steps, although my dorm is in the opposite direction. I am not far from Tea Rose’s.

  “Where are you headed?” she asks.

  I stop. I don’t know if I want to see Tea Rose. I want to see him as though the other night never happened, in some untapped before. And yet I am also anxious to survey the after, to find out if anything will feel different.

  “I’m not sure,” I say honestly.

  Joan laughs. She definitely laughs a lot. “I know that feeling. Do you want to come over for a drink or something?”

  This is what people do, I realize. They seek friends and make friends and hang out with those friends. They plan things in advance and they do things spur of the moment. They don’t wait until circumstances force their togetherness—like being assigned a roommate, for example—or until the need to be pressed into another body that needs to be pressed overtakes them. I knew how to do this once. I might learn again. Being around Joan feels liberating, fortifying.

  “Yes. I’d love to.” It feels like a triumph to say that, and to mean it. The only thing troubling me at the moment is that I still don’t know her name and still don’t know how to ask.

  “Where do you live?”

  We are walking toward the main campus gate, me on the walkway still patchy with snow and ice and her in the road. The lampposts cast evenly spaced shadows of themselves. A loud group of two girls and three boys passes us going the other way, red cups in their hands. Behind us, a shout followed by a gale of laughter—one of the girls has fallen. Joan is a few steps ahead of me now, hands in her pockets, head down as though heading into a great wind. Her back suggests that she has seen nothing and felt nothing.

  “Drunk kids,” I joke, catching up to her. She looks at me and smiles, as though just remembering that I am there. “I barely notice anyone at this place anymore.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “It’s rare for anyone to stand out.”

  “Yes.” I think about Tea Rose. He is expecting me, I feel convinced, and a bit of guilt creeps in, but then I unconvince myself with surprising ease.

  “My house isn’t too much farther. It’s on Church Street.”

  If she lives off campus, she must be a junior or a senior, I reason. The house is typical of the student rentals adjacent to campus: tall, narrow, ramshackle. We go up some stairs and then some more stairs and then we are in a kitchen.

  “Do you have roommates?” I ask.

  Joan plops her bag down on a chair and puts her coat on top of it. I do the same. The kitchen table is 1950s style, Formica and chrome, with mismatched chairs.

  “I have two. They’re both on the track team. We’re almost never here at the same time—we keep opposite hours, pretty much. When they’re not at practice or in the library, they hang out at the rugby house. I think their boyfriends live there.” She laughs. “It’s like living alone, but because I know they’re here, I don’t ever really get lonely. Their rooms are on this floor. Mine’s upstairs.”

  She opens the refrigerator and lifts out a jug of wine. With her other hand she opens a peeling cupboard door and takes out two mugs, clinking them together by their handles. “Come on. Let’s go upstairs.”

  I follow her up more stairs, these very narrow, opening to a small landing with a slanted ceiling and an ancient-looking heater in one corner. On the far wall, a door whose top edge slants along with the ceiling. I recall my favorite childhood books, all of which prominently featured garrets. Was this a garret? Did the house have a scullery too?

  I realize Joan is looking at me. “What’s wrong?” she asks.

  “Oh. Nothing. This part of the house just reminds me of a storybook or something. It’s very cozy.”

  “I think so too. Neither of the other girls wanted anything to do with being up here, so I didn’t even have to fight for it.” Joan pushes the door open. “You want to see my room?”

  I duck my head—some sudden but wrong feeling of tallness, the door frame still five or six inches above me—and go inside. A twin bed with a faded quilt. A small dresser hidden behind a rack of hanging clothes. An old stereo flanked by cinder-block-propped shelves crowded with cassettes and CDs.

  “You don’t have a desk?”

  “Nah. I do my homework out here on the floor or at the music library when I’m working.” Joan hands me a mug of wine. It’s cold and tastes like cough syrup. Joan puts music on. The Pixies. We sit on the floor of the landing and she turns a dial on the ancient heater. It thunks, shudders, and then starts to rattle, its orange warmth a kind of final destination, a place we earned. We talk about our roommates and what classes we’re taking. We talk about the class we took together last semester, about the Chinese boy who raised his hand constantly and never got the answer right and one day left the room in sobs. She asks me questions about the dining hall. She laughs at a lot of what I say. I wonder if I am funny. We look at the heater more than at each other, its metallic glow as mesmerizing as a real flame, its presence a real presence. We fill our mugs a couple more times, each cup less cold than the last.

  In the warmth and rattle and talk and music, I have no thoughts. I feel blissfully erased. Joan is saying something about how she used to ride horses with her sister. I am reminded, amid this polyphony, of my body. It has to pee.

  “Downstairs, right off the kitchen,” Joan says.

  I drift downstairs and locate the tiny bathroom, its door a plastic accordion-type thing that clicks shut with a magnet. I pee for what feels like fifteen minutes and take a long time washing my hands. I let the water run while I flip open the medicine cabinet. It is crammed full with makeup, Band-Aids, tubes of toothpaste, deodorant, hair ties, and various over-the-counter drugs. I anticipate needing aspirin later, so I help myself to two, swallowing them down with tap water. I still don’t know Joan’s name. If Joan’s name is not Joan, I will be, I fear, upset.

  A powerful need to find out propels me, quietly, around the house. On the other side of the kitchen is a small living room whose large windows face the street. Light from the streetlights streams in. A car passes by on the street below, its headlights briefly striping the room. In the corner is a low bookshelf, a few purses, and what looks like Mardi Gras beads hanging over the sides of it, various books, papers, and odds and ends filling its meager spaces. On the top shelf is a stack of mail. I hiccup loudly, almost losing my balance. The wine is all at once upon me.

  I can steal the mail. I can steal anything around me right now—the beads, a lamp—because I am alone and because these mugs of sugary wine are good facilitators. I don’t know what I’m looking for but I want a souvenir. I hold the slim stack of envelopes in the line of light converging from the kitchen and the street.

  Ashleigh P McGill

  Ashleigh McGill

  Ashleigh McGil

&nb
sp; Joan Gertzman

  Nicole Zigler

  Nicole Zeigler

  Joan S Gertzman

  An index card with ELECTRIC BILL DUE TUESDAY/TRASHCANS scribbled on it in blue marker. I can barely believe my eyes, don’t believe them at first. Somewhere in this house lives a Joan. The person upstairs, I know, is Joan, because I knew she was Joan before now, before knowing she was Joan, on paper, on something as incontrovertible as mail. She is not Ashleigh. She is no more Ashleigh than I am. She cannot be a Nicole, because of her face, which is not the face of a Nicole. The face of a Nicole is not at odds with the hair of a Nicole, not at odds with the world. The Joan I felt was Joan is an actual Joan, and I want to scream that I am, that I must be, as I always suspected, a true psychic with true psychic powers. What a gift it is to be right about something!

  I put the mail back carefully and practically run up the stairs. Joan is lying on her back, eyes closed, face somewhere between sleep and a smile.

  “Hi,” I say. “Sorry.”

  Joan opens her eyes. “Oh, hey. What time is it? I was starting to fall asleep.”

  She doesn’t ask where I was or what I was doing. She doesn’t say that line I hate, the one people like to say, about falling in the toilet. I look at my watch. “It’s almost midnight. I should probably get going.”

  Joan stretches her arms overhead and points her toes, like a guitar string being tightened. She sits up and rubs her face, attempts to smooth her fuzzy hair. “Thanks for hanging out. This was fun.”

  “Thanks for having me over.” I pause. “Joan. And for the wine and everything. I had a great time.”

  “Want me to walk you down?”

  “No, no, don’t bother. I’ll be fine.”

  “Sure you’ll be okay walking home? Where do you live?”

  For a minute, I forget. I picture my house. I picture my dad sitting alone at the kitchen table, drinking a glass of milk. I picture Tea Rose’s room, his bed. I picture my dorm, finally. So many places to go and nowhere to live. “I’m on campus. Not far.”

  “Which dorm?”

  “Halsey.”

  Joan sits lotus-style and puts her hands on her knees like she’s going to do some chanting. I am very aware of her movements, each one very intentional. “I used to live there! What floor?”

  “Third.”

  “Ha! Me too.” She gives herself a little hug, squeezing hard for an instant before letting go. “Okay,” she says, “I’m going to get ready for bed. You’re welcome to stay here if you’d rather not walk back. Up to you. I’ve got a sleeping bag and plenty of pillows.”

  Another place to sleep. Maybe the goal is to sleep in as many places as possible, and not just one.

  “That’s all right. Thanks, though. I’ll see you soon, I’m sure.”

  “Bye, Agnes.”

  “Bye, Joan.”

  Dear Mom,

  Remember that trip we took to the mountains where Simon and I were kind of “against” you and Dad? We complained about the music in the car on the drive there, and the food we ate when we stopped, and the cabin when we finally arrived? Thinking about it now, it was a fascinating thing that happened. Where I felt this opportunity to be close to Simon, and the only way to do it was to ally myself with him and against everyone else. I know it was probably a shitty vacation for you and Dad. I know we were probably insufferable to be around. But it was like Simon and I tacitly pledged our loyalty to one another, like away from home, without his friends or my friends or whatever other factors pronounced our differences, our different ages (12 and 20) and our different stations in the world and in our family, just disappeared, and we became brother and sister, blood-bound in a way we’d never explored. Or in a way he’d never permitted me to explore.

  I think Simon enjoyed it as an experiment. I enjoyed it as an omen, which it turned out not to be. Back at home, things went back to usual, us on our separate floors, keeping opposite hours. The day after we got back, I remember talking to Jenny on the phone in the kitchen when Simon came upstairs, took the phone from where it was wedged between my cheek and shoulder, hung it up, and called his girlfriend, all within the space of about 4 seconds. I stomped up the stairs to my room and slammed the door, half hoping he’d call after me or follow me when he got off the phone. He did neither, and a few minutes later I heard the back door open and shut and the car roar out of the driveway—your car, since he had totaled his 2 months before.

  But when we were in the mountains, he laughed at my jokes. On our last night there, we sat outside behind the cabin in the dark for a long time. There was no moon and the stars were less bright than you might imagine, for the mountains. We could barely see. We took turns making faces and trying to guess what face we were making, smiling or frowning, opened eyes or closed or winking.

  He told me something that I still have a hard time believing. Before I was born, he said, he had an imaginary friend. Daniel. He said he talked to Daniel under the covers at night and outside when he was playing by himself—anytime he felt alone, he said, he talked to Daniel. He said that on his first day of kindergarten, you told him he was not to speak to Daniel or even say his name. He said one time his teacher caught him in the bathroom, chatting quietly with Daniel with the faucet running, when the rest of the class was having nap time. He begged her not to tell you. We wondered if she did or not—did she? Anyway, he said that when I came into the picture, there was a tiny part of him that was disappointed I was not a boy, a real live Daniel. It made me sad. If I could have been a Daniel, I would have been. Maybe then he wouldn’t have given up.

  He talked about you and Dad. He said you were a melancholic and Dad was a regular guy, which was a good combination. He said his girlfriend was a melancholic and he was one, too, which was not a good combination. I asked him what I was and he said, “You’re happy and smart. Don’t let anything ruin that.” It’s funny to be told that you’re happy. When he said it, I felt it. If anyone else had said it, I would’ve probably been suspicious. He also clearly had no idea how much he had to do with my happiness, how easily he was able to make me happy.

  Nobody wants anything to be ruined. But ruin still happens. Ruin does not seek permission. How could he not have known this, him of all people? Did he believe in the idea of the chosen few, that some people were destined to be happy and would be, no matter what befell them, and some people would never be? Or that some people have predetermined abilities to control disaster, to save themselves from too much pain, and some people do not? Did he say goodbye to himself before he did it, look at his own face in the mirror?

  Not rhetorical questions,

  Agnes

  “So you’re interested in setting, the physical circumstances?”

  I’m sitting in Professor Donald’s office and it is the middle of March, the longest March I can remember, a month that has always felt like one eternal middle, thick with no narrowing. Outside is bright, the snow glinting patchily with ice.

  “Yes.” With some effort I force my eyes to move from the window to the open book in my lap.

  Professor Donald gives off an almost tiring sense of length: long legs and arms; long face; long, unkempt black and gray hair; long teeth; long fingers; long skirts. She is less body than line and brain, her face a display monitor for the ideas that seem constantly to afflict her. Now she is reaching up to her tallest shelf to pull down a book. Her office is a mess of books and papers, except for her desk, which is oddly bare save for a few pens, a pristine blotter, and a closed daybook.

  “Miller has some interesting things to say about that. You might start here, in your research.” She pulls a Post-it from somewhere and marks the page before handing me the book.

  “Okay, I will. Thanks.”

  She slides between her desk and the bulging bookshelf and sits across from me. “Do you have a specific angle? Have you worked out a thesis yet?”

  I cringe at the question. I cringe under the specific. I know this about myself. I will get the details wrong. I will g
et the aura exactly right but the details wrong. I fight the urge to lift my shirt up and scream, a thing I’ve always felt like doing in the middle of church.

  “Well. Not exactly. But it just leapt out at me right away, how the house and all of the items in the book are described more in depth than the characters. Like the people are secondary, like what the author really wanted to write about was the house, but I guess there can’t be a book about just a house, with no people.”

  “Couldn’t there?” Professor Donald asked, a smile idling somewhere beneath her long face.

  I think about my house. Everything in it belongs to someone or is an expression of someone. So the house is everyone, all of us, but most of us are no longer in it. What does that make it? A collage? A ghost?

  Professor Donald’s smile surfaces. “I don’t mean to put you on the spot, Agnes. I like where your thoughts are going. With some fine-tuning and narrowing in, you could write a very provocative essay.”

  I realize that it is my own house I’d been picturing as I read the book for class. I realize this with some embarrassment. Do I read anything, see anything, hear anything, or only myself? My self, the shoebox for a thousand dioramas. My self, the only book ever written. I am going to end up writing a paper about myself, again. Poor Professor Donald.

  I do the thing where I thank her and say goodbye and thank her again and leave the room awkwardly, sort of stepping backward, only to get to the front door of Stein Hall and realize that I forgot the book she wants me to use. I hurry back to get it. I pause for a moment outside her door, still ajar as I’d left it. She is sitting at her desk, erasing something from her blotter, though I had not seen any mark on it whatsoever.

  “Sorry—I forgot the book you gave me.”

  She looks pained to see me again but says, not unkindly, “Ah. It’s there where you left it.” Her hand is covering the place she was just erasing. I take the book, thanking her and apologizing some more, and leave her brushing eraser dust from her desk and lap.