Elegies for the Brokenhearted

by Christie Hodgen

  “At least,” I said, “I’m not getting letters from James Findley Ramsey the Third.”

  At least, you said, people care what happening with me. Nobody even notice you. Nobody care what you do or fail to do, you ever notice?

  “What’s your fucking problem?”

  I’m not the one with the problem. You the one with problems. Nobody like you at all. Thin Mint don’t even like you and Thin Mint like everybody.

  “At least,” I said, “I get out of bed in the morning.”

  Good for you, you said. Just a minute while I call up the president and tell him about it. Hello, Georgie? you said, thumb in your ear, pinkie extended toward your mouth. Hey, George, it’s me again, what’s happening? I’m just calling to tell you my roommate, Mary Murphy? Look like a walking corpse? Uh-huh, that’s the one. I’m just calling to tell you she get out of bed this morning. Uh-huh. What’s that? You gonna give her the Medal of Honor? Oh, George, you too much.

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  To which you of course responded: You wish.

  “Why don’t you go hang out with the other girls, then,” I said, meaning the heiresses all up and down our hall, blond and blue-eyed and rich, one indistinguishable from the next, their closets so overflowing with clothes, with silks and velvets, with tweeds and cashmere, that many of them had been obliged during the first week of school to go out and purchase additional bureaus. By which I meant the girls you had spent the entire year making fun of, referring to as Blondie and Barbie and Baby and Bitchface.

  And so you did. You dropped me in the coldest way you could think of—by making yourself popular. When I came home from the library one night you were sitting in the lounge with a circle of girls gathered around you. You were telling their fortunes—reading their palms—and had dressed the part, your head wrapped in a red turban, gold hoops dangling from your ears. You sat running the sharp edge of your fingernail along the girls’ lifelines, money lines, love lines. On successive evenings crowds of lovesick girls lined up to see you, standing in line in their satin Doris Day pajamas, their faces covered in mud masks, their hair in curlers, wanting to know—they held out their palms to you, desperate and helpless—whether they were loved by certain boys, boys with names like Preston Carrington and Wesley Knoxville. One of the girls, the loudest and blondest of all, was named Lacy Winterson, and she was in love with a boy named—in all official, Confederate seriousness—Rhett Butler. “Does Rhett Butler,” said Lacy, “love me? Is he the one?”

  Let’s see, you said. Sit down. You took her hand in yours, peered at it, lifted an eyebrow.

  “What!” said Lacy. “What’s it say?”

  Quiet, you told her. This one special. I need to concentrate on this one. You tortured her, studied her palm for five whole minutes without saying anything, pulling at her skin, bunching it together and then stretching it out, bending her fingers back. Well, you said, finally, that’s what I was afraid of. I don’t see any way out of it.

  “What?” said Lacy.

  You gonna get married all right, you said. And you gonna be happy for a while. You stopped, got up and crossed the room, picked up and flipped through a magazine while Lacy sat on the edge of the couch, her mouth hanging open.

  “Then what?” she said in the softest voice.

  Well, you said, I can’t say for sure. But after a certain point you ain’t gonna be happy no more. Though this was the vaguest possible fortune, and bound to come true for more or less everyone on earth, Lacy felt doomed in a very particular way, as though she alone had been singled out to suffer a rare disease. Her eyes brimmed with tears and she shut herself away in her room.

  You were wildly popular. “Carson,” the girls told you, “we had no idea you were so awesome!” They invited you to the private pizza parties they held in their rooms. Each night these girls had pizza delivered to the dorm by other students who didn’t have money, and so worked as delivery drivers, students who suffered the indignity of wearing uniforms equally as bad as Donut Land’s, and you sat on the other side of this divide quite regally. You sat in those rooms telling all kinds of stories. I could hear you talking and the girls erupting in laughter. They liked to call you “girlfriend.” “Hey, girlfriend,” they said. You made a habit of exclaiming, in a voice so loud it was sure to carry into our room: It sure is nice to have some fun for a change!

  One night you sat in the lobby in your gypsy wear but didn’t have any takers—the thrill was gone and everyone was studying for finals, which you didn’t have to worry about because you had already failed. You returned to the room and took your suitcases out from your closet, started taking clothes off their hangers, went fussing about the room. You took the pictures down from the wall, picked the little circles of tape off their backs. When you were finished packing you sat on your bed and sighed. This was my cue to say something like, “You’re leaving already? You’re not staying through finals?” But I didn’t. I had one talent in life and it was staying silent through a grudge. In all my years fighting with my sister and mother I had never once broken first.

  There was a Creature Double Feature running on the local channel, some black-and-white horror film involving the destruction of a city by a giant reptile. The music soared in what was supposed to be suspense, but the effects were laughable. Pitiful, you said. It was a long time before you spoke again, and when you did it was with annoyance. Gimme your hand, you said.

  “Why?”

  To read your fortune, dummy.

  It had never crossed my mind that you could actually read a palm—I’d assumed that you only claimed to read palms as a means of telling people what you really thought of them, as a means of dooming them toward unpleasant futures, out of spite. But I let you anyway.

  Average, you said. Nothing too exciting. Then you examined my other hand, turned it this way and that in the light of the television.

  This here’s not too common, you said, tracing a line that slanted across my palm, left to right. Not too common at all. Fact I never seen this here in real life, just in books, never up close in person. An extra line, you claimed. Strange. Like a sixth finger.

  “What’s it mean?” I said.

  It could mean one of two things. People think different ways about it.

  “What do they think?” I wanted to know but you were coy. I don’t think anybody really know what that line mean. It’s too uncommon for anybody to say for sure what it mean.

  “What’s it mean?” I said. “I’m gonna die any minute, right? It’s okay. You can tell me. I don’t believe in this stuff.”

  No, you said. Not that.

  “Then what?”

  I tell you what I think it means, you said. My personal opinion. And I already thought this anyways from the minute I saw you. What I think it means is you gonna be famous.

  “For what?” I said.

  Can’t say, you told me. You don’t have any special talents far as I can see.

  We watched as a giant lizard reared up on its hind legs and bit the spire from the Empire State Building. Maybe, you said, you’ll be one of those people who breaks a record. For the longest fingernails or something. Maybe you’ll live to a hundred and fifty.

  “What’s the other thing?” I said. “You said it could mean two things.”

  I forget, you said. Then you got up and snapped off the television. That was the thing about you. You talked and talked and talked, but as soon as someone wanted you to talk, you clammed up and turned your back.

  We lay in the dark, quiet, for a long time. I was turning a question over in my mind but didn’t know how to put it into words. I kept trying to think of what to say, and failing, until finally I had the feeling that if I didn’t hurry you’d fall asleep and I wouldn’t get to ask you, and so I burst out with it: Why? Why, why, why? Why were you going back to that place? Why had you thrown it all away? For what possible reason? I wanted you to give me one good reason why.

  It was a long moment before you answered me, and when you did
it was more than I’d bargained for. I’m gonna tell you something, you said, and if you ever tell anyone else I’ll kill you. Even after I’m done telling you I don’t wanna hear a word out of you, I don’t wanna hear a single peep. You just keep lying there quiet like always. Not a word. You say a single word and I’ll kill you. And then you told me why. You told me how Sharon, your sister, had given birth years ago to a baby but had lost it in labor, and after that couldn’t have any more children, though a child was what she had always wanted most in life. So when you’d gotten pregnant in your junior year there was at first talk in the house of adoption, of sending you off to some home and telling everyone you’d gone away on scholarship to some fancy summer school, but the more you talked about this with your mother and Sharon the worse it seemed, with Sharon not being able to bear children and all, and here you were with one you didn’t want, here you were with college and a bright future ahead of you ruined, it started to seem like a good idea to give your baby to Sharon. It seemed reasonable to keep you both in the house claiming illness, mononucleosis, reasonable to tell everyone, after you had the baby at home, that it was Sharon’s. The point is, you said, as if I hadn’t already figured out the truth, as if I weren’t already aching with it, the reason why I’m going home, the reason I can’t stand it here, Regis belong to me.

  “Oh, Carson,” I said.

  And you said: Shut up, fool. Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I tell you not to say a word to me? You ever say one more word to me again I’ll kill you. I’m leaving in the morning, my daddy’s driving up to get me, and if you say one goddamn word to me I swear to God I’ll scratch your eyes out. We’re done here.

  The next morning you were up early, stuffing your sheets and blankets and pillows into a white trash bag you’d pilfered from the bathroom wastebasket (White trash, you said to yourself, and chuckled), going around the room pulling out drawers again and again until you were satisfied that no trace of yourself remained. You made trips outside, carrying down your suitcases, then the television. Then you came back up and stood in the window watching for your father. I sat up in bed and said hello, but you didn’t say anything. A long time passed until finally you saw what you were looking for, the stout figure of Merriweather Washington making his way toward the dorm, and you up and left.

  Bye! you said, and slammed the door behind you.

  After you left I stood at the window watching—you knew I would. Your father was walking on ahead of you carrying the television and your bag of bedding, slouchy and weary as Willy Loman. You were following lazily behind him, a suitcase in each hand. Just when I thought you weren’t going to look back you set your suitcases down, you turned and called up to me, hands cupping your mouth. Hey, you said, I forgot to tell you something!

  By now you had attracted the attention of clusters of students walking past, the normal kids who were out enjoying the fine spring air. They stopped and stared, some looking at you, some looking at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “You better work on being famous,” you called. “Otherwise you gonna drown.”

  A few days later it came time for me to see James Findley Ramsey III, who was my academic advisor and therefore responsible for helping me with the selection of fall courses. I had failed to register for anything and this had come to his attention; he had sent a letter. It was funny to see him in person, more or less exactly as we imagined him, pink and plump as a Christmas ham, blue suit, white shirt, blue-and-orange-striped tie, silver hair, false teeth, hot handshake. He was the jovial “Come in, come in! Sit down, sit down!” type who you couldn’t help but oblige. “Mary Murphy,” he said, and opened a manila folder stuffed with papers. I wondered what was in there. “You’ve taken quite a variety of courses,” he said. “Which is what liberal arts is all about, isn’t it?” He chuckled. Then sighed. Then frowned. He said that he regretted the necessity of settling down and focusing one’s efforts on a single field, but that it was time to do so. It was time to start thinking about what I wanted to do with myself. Had I thought of this?

  I said I had.

  “And what,” he asked, “did you conclude?”

  I said I had concluded that I had no particular talents and couldn’t imagine myself in any type of job whatsoever.

  “Well,” he said. He leaned forward, clasped his hands together in little fists. He was getting excited. His skin flushed and he appeared for a moment to be on the verge of cardiac arrest. A challenge! An academic soul in need of direction! “People with no particular talents,” he said, “don’t win full scholarships, do they?”

  I regretted to inform him that, in some unfortunate cases, it appeared that they did.

  “Nonsense! You must have some special abilities.” Desperately he scanned my file. “French!” he said. “You placed out of French! A nice, high score, too. That’s special. What about French? Have you thought about French?”

  “Sure,” I said. Though I’d never really seen French as a skill. I’d taken it in high school and only done well because my grandparents were both first-generation French immigrants, and I’d spent a lot of time with them as a kid. My grandparents had always spoken to each other in French when they didn’t want me to understand what they were saying, but over the years I’d picked up a working vocabulary. “Get out of here,” I learned to say. “Give me a break; Stop screwing around the house and get out of my hair; I’ve had enough; You’re driving me crazy; Leave me alone; Where are my keys; You’ve had too much to drink again; When is their mother picking them up, when is she going to stop fucking around and take responsibility for things; It’s not my fault; It’s never anybody’s fault, but it has to be somebody’s.” My grandfather was a bus driver, and in my teenage years I’d spent my afternoons riding around the city with him, on the seat behind him, and he’d taught me more. “Look at this guy about to get on,” I learned to say, “what a pathetic bastard, his spine so crooked he looks like a question mark. If I ever get crippled like that I want you to kill me immediately.” I had always enjoyed the language—how it had a way of softening even the most grotesque phrases, of lending an air of sophistication to the mundane life around me—and I told James Ramsey that I supposed its virtues were worth further study.

  “Excellent!” he said. “How do you say ‘excellent’ in French?”

  “Excellent,” I said.

  “Right-o!” he said.

  Suddenly he was plotting my entire future, flipping through the course catalog and choosing courses on Hugo, Voltaire, Flaubert. “These aren’t in translation, see?” he said. “The whole text is in French. Quite a challenge! Wow, right?”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “There’s a good buck in French!” James Ramsey said. “Kidding, kidding. There’s not a good buck in French, of course. But you could teach. Maybe even on the college level. That’s a nice life. I taught history here for a number of years and found it very satisfying.” He rubbed his hands together. I stood up, and he actually gave me a little hug. I had made his day, he said. He had saved my life in under five minutes and he was going to go home and tell his wife about it.

  And so, because I was nothing if not suggestible, I spent the next three years as a French major and with characteristic French selfishness more or less forgot about you. Sophomore year I became an R.A. myself, became the French-major version of Belinda Wimpy. I lived alone in a dorm room smoking French cigarettes one after another through a foot-long ebony holder. I wore black turtlenecks and listened to French music and read French newspapers and watched French films. Whenever two or more people gathered in a room and started to enjoy themselves, I knocked on their door and reminded them of the dormitory policies forbidding their behavior. I quit Donut Land and took a job checking books out of the library, which was more like Donut Land than I cared to admit. In both cases people had to go through me to get something they wanted, and I didn’t want to let them have it. I sat in judgment of them. I was silent and huffy with the date stamp, I slid the books across the c
ounter with a glare that said: You’re lucky I’m letting you have this. I made a habit of hating everyone and the time passed quickly.

  In my junior year, in a class on Tocqueville, I met and went crazy for one Roger Preston Fairbanks, political science major, son of an ambassador, former prep-school classmate of Dan Quayle’s son. Roger had been to Dan Quayle’s house, had even been to George Bush’s house in Kennebunkport, Maine, and believed that this was all one needed in life to be successful. And indeed this seemed to be true. After my first date with Roger I went back to my dorm and stood in front of the bathroom mirror and said, over and over, I am Dan Quayle’s son’s friend’s girlfriend! mostly realizing how pathetic I sounded but also secretly thrilled.

  Roger said that he liked my look, as if it was something I’d cultivated, some kind of anemic chic. We dated all through junior year and spent the summer together at his Maryland house, at which there were yachts. Yachts! And though these people—these friends of Roger’s with whom I had nothing in common, and who furthermore seemed to be in some way responsible for the misery of everyone in my family—were not my people, I was, in truth, desperate to know them, to become one of them, to speak and dress and carry myself just like they did, I had never been so desperate in my life. But then Roger dumped me the next year, as soon as he got into law school, saying that he wanted to arrive in New Haven focused and unattached.

  Dumped!

  I had been dumped!

  I spent the rest of the semester in my dorm room and only left when I absolutely had to. These instances I dashed from place to place, wearing sunglasses and headphones, so that if I ran into Roger or any of his friends I would not have to speak. I went so long without talking to anyone that I started having trouble with things as basic as purchasing groceries. The exchange of money at the register, the back-and-forth with the cashier, was becoming difficult.

  In the afternoons I crossed the street to a Chinese restaurant, the Dragon Lady, which sold giant bowls of wanton soup for a dollar, and I sat there for hours eating that soup, long since turned cold, thinking that it was strange to be alone in a restaurant so much, although slightly less strange, on the whole, than sitting alone at home.