Saint X

by Alexis Schaitkin

  My mom just drives me crazy. Like, you do not get to choose to raise your family in a place with only white people plus a few Indian and Chinese doctors and then convince yourself that your kid desperately loved the black gardener who you took her outside for some beneficial interaction with, and that this love is proof that even though you made the choices you made, it doesn’t matter, because your kids are good and you are good and you are all just so very, very good.

  * * *

  I RETURNED to the Little Sweet again a few nights later. Clive looked up when I walked through the door. He did not acknowledge me, and I pretended not to notice him. I got in line. I could feel him watching me. Vincia was curt with me, all business. I paid for my food. Then I turned and let my eyes fall on him as if I’d just spotted him. I walked over to his table.

  “Back again,” he said.

  “You caught me. I think I’m officially hooked. May I?” I gestured shyly at the empty chair across from him.

  My request flustered him. But I figured he wouldn’t be so rude as to say no, and I was right.

  “Please.”

  In the weeks that followed, I went to the Little Sweet many times. Each time I feigned sheepishness when I asked to join Clive, and each time he said yes. I grew quite adept at playing the role I had created for myself, that of a lonely exile in New York, a girl from far away, all alone. While Clive did not exactly seem to welcome my presence, it seemed to me that, gradually, he was warming to me, or perhaps I should say to Emily.

  What did we talk about? We traded stories from work—a boorish passenger, a temperamental author. We commiserated over the various urban creatures making incursions into our apartments—silverfish in my shower, mice in his ceiling. I told him about my short-lived kickball career, and he told me he’d played in a cricket league until a shoulder injury a few years earlier sidelined him. But mostly, as New Yorkers are wont to, we talked about the city itself, which provided for us a language of common approval and disdain: De Blasio’s carriage horse crusade—a lost cause. The MTA—abysmal. Pedicabs—a nuisance.

  I told stories composed of inventions and half-truths about a childhood in flyover country, hoping that these confessions would elicit some from Clive in return. I would try—carefully, so carefully—to ask questions that might lead to a revelation of some kind. Did he plan to go home someday? Did he miss his family? What was he like as a child? Nothing. Often, I caught him telling small lies. For instance, take this exchange, from our third night together:

  “Have you been driving a taxi since you moved to New York?”

  “Yes. Though I only switched to the day shift a few years ago.”

  “I hope you won’t think this is weird, but I looked up the island you’re from online. It looks, like, ridiculously beautiful.”

  “Yes, it was quite beautiful.”

  “What’s it like, like, living in a tourist destination?”

  “New York is also a tourist destination.”

  “I guess that’s true. Did you drive a taxi down there, too?”

  “No.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Odd jobs, mostly.”

  * * *

  ANOTHER EXAMPLE, from a few weeks later:

  “How was your day?”

  “The traffic was terrible.”

  “This time of year must be the worst, huh? With the holidays coming?”

  “There’s always something. In spring, it’s the parades. In fall, it’s the UN summit. The tourists are quite bad now. Today I picked up a family at St. Patrick’s that barely spoke English. They asked me to take them to Rockefeller Center. I tried to tell them it’s just around the corner, but the mother kept saying, ‘Skating! Skating!’ Finally I just drove them there.”

  “I haven’t been skating since I moved here.”

  “I’ve never been.”

  “Really?”

  “We didn’t have a lot of ice growing up, miss.”

  “Right, I’m sorry. That was stupid. We used to skate all winter long, as soon as the Wabash froze over. I remember my feet would turn so numb that when I took off my skates I’d cry.” (Truths nested in lies nested in truths. The pain of numb toes warming after skating—a memory as visceral as any from my childhood. But the Wabash River? A strip of blue cellophane in my fourth-grade diorama.) “All the kids from my neighborhood would be playing some game together on the ice, and I was always just skating by myself off to the side. It was like I couldn’t figure it out somehow. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever really had a best friend?”

  “Me, neither.”

  TONIGHT WAS my senior dance recital. I’ve been practicing for months. I choreographed the dance myself. I probably spent a hundred hours practicing. But as soon as I stepped onto the stage and went up for my first pirouette, I knew I would fall short. It was like it had already happened and there was nothing I could do about it.

  I danced and it was fine. I didn’t mess up or anything, but I wasn’t inside the music the way I wanted to be. When the recital was over I put on my sweats and went out to the lobby and there’s twenty people giving me flowers and accosting me with praise. “Oh my god, Alison, you’re so amazing.” “You’re so talented.” “That was so great.” Blah blah blah fanfuckingtastic.

  Are most people so insensitive to what’s going on that it all looks the same to them? I mean, how did everybody totally miss what actually happened tonight? I didn’t make a single mistake, not one, and I still completely failed.

  Flowers and white teeth. This was my image of my sister, taken from this very recital. She had seemed to float with happiness that night. What a shock to learn that she had in fact been seething with self-criticism and hostility. How well she had hidden it! I had not thought my sister capable of such deep dissatisfaction.

  * * *

  I FLEW to Pasadena for Thanksgiving. I resented this disruption to the progress I was making with Clive, but could see no way around it. It was the same small gathering as always: me, my parents, Aunt Caroline, and a man my mother referred to, in a tone that managed to sound simultaneously empty of and loaded with judgment, as “the flavor of the month.” This time he was an acupuncturist of Argentine extraction. Aunt Caroline was in her sixties and skinnier than ever, her lips plumped to the edge of tastefulness with Restylane. The acupuncturist looked to be about forty-five. Aunt Caroline had been dating forty-five-year-old men since she was twenty and it seemed she had no plans of stopping now.

  Before the meal we assumed our usual positions, my mother and me in the kitchen, Aunt Caroline, the boyfriend, and my father chatting in the living room. (“I promise I’ll stay out from underfoot,” Aunt Caroline said to my mother, as if she were doing her a favor by sitting on the couch getting tipsy on Cab Franc.) At the dinner table, things proceeded the same as always.

  “The garden is looking magnificent. What’s your secret?” Aunt Caroline asked my father, who launched into an animated discourse on his approaches to fertilizing, pruning, watering, pest control.

  “And what’s new with you, darling?” Aunt Caroline asked, leaning toward me.

  Before I even had time to concoct a convincing reply, my father chimed in. “Em’s getting into yoga.”

  “How fabulous!” Aunt Caroline said. “I have a friend who swears she grew two inches when she started practicing yoga.”

  “It’s fantastic for your alignment,” my father said. “And it transforms the way your body processes carbon dioxide.”

  “Is that right?” my mother asked.

  “NPR.” My father shrugged.

  The conversation moved on to other subjects—the consulting project my father had picked up in his retirement, the dash of fish sauce my mother had added to the roasted Brussels sprouts this year, the half marathon in Huntington Beach my father had registered for and the nagging knee injury that would likely prevent him from running it.

  As the meal progressed, its mundanity began to feel increasingly phantasmagoric. How was it possible they
didn’t realize something was happening to me? The conversation continued—my mother couldn’t take this new contingent that had joined her book club, they never read the books, she was honestly considering defecting. I clenched my fists under the table, digging my fingernails into my palms. This, I now saw, was exactly how our family had maintained itself since Alison’s death, by not squinting too closely at one another, not knowing one another too well.

  As soon as we’d finished the pie, I announced that I was feeling terribly jet-lagged and headed to bed early, though I lay awake much of the night, staring out the window at my father’s violets, which held perfectly still in the dry, windless dark.

  * * *

  ON SATURDAY morning I woke up early. Aunt Caroline and her boyfriend had flown home the night before. My flight to JFK wasn’t until the evening. I found my mother in the kitchen.

  “Coffee?” she asked, already opening the cabinet and reaching for a mug.

  “No.”

  “Oh. Tea? Orange juice?”

  I shook my head.

  “How about some breakfast? I can make eggs?”

  “Stop, Mom. I don’t want anything.”

  I went to the dishwasher and began unloading the bowls.

  She put a hand on my shoulder. “You spoil me.”

  I shrugged her off. She winced and shrank back from me with a wounded expression. Suddenly I felt nothing but revulsion for this fragile bird of a woman, my mother. I wanted to hurt her, and not like I just had, not with some minor daughterly rudeness, but to really hurt her, in a way she could not evade or dismiss.

  “Do you remember Alison’s last dance recital?” I asked.

  She looked down at the floor. As a family, we were not in the habit of bringing up Alison without warning. I kept going. “The one where she danced to—”

  My mother hummed a few bars of the song, then laughed quietly at herself. “Your sister was so beautiful that night.” My mother never said her name.

  “She hated it.”

  “Hated what, darling?”

  “That whole night. Everything about it.”

  “What are you talking about, sweetie? She was on cloud nine.”

  “You’re wrong. She was furious.”

  My mother hugged herself as if the room had grown cold. “You listened.”

  “How would you know? You said you stopped after a few minutes.”

  My mother held my gaze.

  “You listened, too.”

  “Years ago. You were in college and your father was away on business for the week. I just—”

  “Couldn’t help it.”

  She nodded.

  “Then you know what I’m talking about. You know how upset she was that night.”

  My mother sighed. “I know that’s what she said, sweetheart. But I was there. I saw her. She was so happy.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “All I can say is I know what I saw.”

  I gritted my teeth. It was so like her, this aloof denial of an unpleasant truth.

  “Honey, what was that?”

  I stuffed my hand in my pocket. “What was what?”

  “Your hand. I thought I saw…”

  “An itch.”

  Strange, how something can lie dormant in you for years, so long you forget about it, and then it’s back like it never left. It had been happening for a few weeks now, the need growing more difficult to suppress—words prickling in my fingertips, desperate to get out. S-o h-a-p-p-y.

  “Sweetheart, are you getting enough fresh air?”

  Fresh air? Fanfuckingtastic.

  * * *

  IT’S TEMPTING to paint my nighttime meetings with Clive retroactively with a shiny gloss, to suggest that after a while we achieved an easy rapport, and I want to be careful not to mislead in that way. Even after we’d spent hours together, our conversations remained stilted. Clive often gave only the most perfunctory answers to my questions before falling silent for long stretches. There was one topic, though, that he seemed truly to relish, and that was his job as a hack and the things he had seen, the stories he had to tell. He told me about the crazy conversations he’d overheard. The time someone left a two-hundred-dollar tip on a ten-buck ride. Getting held up in the nineties.

  “I had a man once who started talking to himself,” he began one evening. “He was talking about a heist he was going to execute with a partner. He said, ‘Here’s the plan. I’ll go up to the teller, I’ll show her the gun and tell her she has twenty seconds. When I put my hand in my pocket, you get the customers down on the ground.’ He kept going like this, how they will get into the vault and what they will retrieve from it and where the getaway car will be parked. I began to worry that perhaps I was the getaway car. I was thinking about how I might drive to a police station without him realizing where we were going when he said, ‘So? How did I do?’ He was an actor. It was opening night of his first off-Broadway play.”

  “No.”

  “It’s true.” He grinned. “I’ve also driven three women in labor to the hospital, one of them in a blizzard. She told me she would name her child after me. I remember when I told my son that he said, ‘But what if she had a girl?’ If you ever meet a Clivette, I guess she has me to thank.”

  “You have a son?”

  He appeared flustered, as if he hadn’t meant to reveal this. He nodded. “He’ll be turning twenty-one soon.”

  “He lives here?”

  “Oh, no, no. He’s back home, back—with his mother.”

  “Your wife?”

  He shook his head. “She was a difficult woman. Troubled.”

  “Are you and your son close?”

  He broke off small tatters from the napkin in his fist and collected them in a pile on the table. “I tried at first. She didn’t permit me to be involved.” He cleared his throat. “Here’s another story for you: Would you believe I once picked up Mike Piazza two hours before a home game? His driver was stuck on the Bruckner. It was just after 9/11 and traffic was very bad. I got him to Shea just in time.”

  Clive had spoken the words “my son” like a kiss to a warm forehead. I hadn’t known he had a child. If the boy was twenty now, then he had been two or three years old when Alison was killed. Bile rose in my throat. Clive had been a father when it happened. He should have looked at Alison and seen someone’s child, not whatever she was to him instead: A way of injecting excitement into a life saddled with a kid and responsibilities he wasn’t ready for? The unlucky victim of a man’s anger toward another woman, a “difficult” woman? Had Alison known Clive had a son? As Edwin Hastie slid a cigarette between her lips in the sandy staff parking lot, had Clive told some precious story about his toddler, and had this story made her think these men sweet and safe?

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s amazing.”

  “Only in New York. Before he got out I told him, ‘Mike, I have a confession. Usually I’m a Yankee fan. But tonight I’m rooting for the Mets.’”

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY to me. Woo-hoo. Today, old lady Alison, you are sixteen years old.

  So I can drive now. Very exciting, blah blah blah. For my birthday my parents got me … drumroll, please … a new car!

  That’s right, my dad bought me a brand-spanking-new Audi. So inevitably we had a big fight about it. I wanted a used car. Something low-key. Because, come on. I’m sixteen. Why on earth should I own a brand-new Swedish or German or whatever … why should I have this luxury car that I’m inevitably going to fuck up because I just started driving and, news flash, I don’t know how yet? When I told him that, he was all, “That’s exactly why we want you to have a good, safe car.”

  I mean, he’s right. On the one hand, I completely understand why if you could afford it you would buy the best car you can for your kid. On the other hand, I’m mortified. Not just for me. For my friends, too. On behalf of my friends, especially the ones who are, like, super-excited about their new luxury vehicles and see no issue here whatsoever. We’re teenagers and people are just giving
us these ridiculously nice cars. We should be embarrassed, right?

  But being embarrassed only makes it worse, because if you’re lucky enough to be given a nice, safe, fancy-schmancy car, isn’t it brattier to yell at your dad about it than to just be glad you have it? But then—I feel like there’s this really slippery slope between being glad you have something and thinking you deserve it.

  * * *

  WHEN MY mother had told me that, despite what Alison said in her diary, she was certain my sister had been on cloud nine at her last dance recital, I’d thought she was sticking her head in the sand. But the more I listened to Alison’s diary, the more I began to wonder whether it could be trusted. I began to detect a self-conscious, performative aspect in the things she said. Take Alison’s insistence that she did not want the new car my parents gave her. Are we really to believe that she did not, on some level, want it? Are we really going to accept that she didn’t enjoy having it? Isn’t it more likely that she loved the car—its new-car aroma, its elasticity around a sharp bend, its blue gleam in the school parking lot—but that her own materiality embarrassed her, or she thought it ought to—that she knew a purer person would be embarrassed by it, and she wished to believe she was such a person? Isn’t it more likely that the extended diatribe on the subject that she recorded in the diary was an attempt to reassure herself of her own virtue?

  Or let’s return to the recital. What if my mother was right and Alison was simply giddy eating up compliments after her performance? That’s how I remember it, too. You can see how a diary might become a useful tool, how it might be used to rewrite history, to recast the pivotal moments of one’s life to suggest a humbler, more critical self.

  At the same time, the urgency and raw emotion in Alison’s words were unmistakable, her turmoil palpable. She was grappling with herself. I believe that. Alison at least meant to be honest with herself. Here we run up against yet another problem—the obstacle of her youth. How much does a girl of fifteen or sixteen really understand about herself? How accurate can she possibly be?