How Many Letters Are In Goodbye?

by Yvonne Cassidy

  Yesterday, the whole way up Ninth Avenue, I wasn’t sure I was going to go with Winnie, I just kept saying I’d go another block and then another one and the only reason I went up the stairs to her apartment was because I really needed the loo by the time we got here and when I came out, she had the air conditioner on and the curtains pulled and it was nice and cool and shaded and she gave me a pillow and said that I might as well have a little rest before I get going again.

  The apartment has no proper doors, I remember noticing that last night, only curtains to separate the main sections. This morning, the curtain into the bedroom section is open and the bed is made.

  Upstairs someone is practising a violin and outside there’s the hissing noise of a bus stopping. Inside the apartment it’s quiet and I know already that I’m the only one here but I call out anyway.

  “Winnie?”

  When she doesn’t answer I get up, fold the blankets into a square, and bring them both over to put on the bed and that’s when I see the grey cat, curled up in a circle, fast asleep. It opens one of its eyes and stretches a paw out, so I can see its claws, but it doesn’t move and I don’t touch it. Next to the bed, there’s a stack of books on her locker, lined up in size order with a notebook on the top. For a second I think about opening it, to see if she’s written anything about me, but I walk away before I can.

  The kitchen is a separate room, and I remember as I walk into it that that’s where the bath is too, how she told me loads of the old tenement apartments in Hell’s Kitchen were like that. There’s a piece of wood on top of the bath to make it into a counter and she’s left me a long note, next to a pair of khaki shorts and a blue and white stripy T-shirt. I pick them up and there is a pair of old lady knickers underneath. The note says I can have a bath, to use the clothes, that there’s English muffins and cream cheese in the fridge that I can eat. I hate that it starts “Dear Lisa.”

  While the bath is filling, I look at the posters on her walls. They are on every wall, even the kitchen, and where there’s a gap between posters there are post cards and photographs and sometimes ticket stubs as well. It should look messy, because there’s no order, but it doesn’t, it looks like there’s an order only I can’t see what it is yet.

  It’s ages since I’ve had a bath and even though the water is too hot, I take a deep breath and pull my whole head under, feel the water lift my hair from my skull. It’s longer than I like and I wonder if Winnie would shave it for me, if she has a razor. I hold myself there for as long as I can before I burst back to the top and water gets on the floor, so I have to dry it off with the towel after I’ve dried myself. I’m not going to put her clothes on, except when I sniff the armpits of my T-shirts, they all smell bad and there’s some weird black marks all down the back of my jeans, so I put on her clothes, all except the old lady knickers—I wear the cleanest dirty pair of mine.

  Afterwards, I eat the muffin but it’s small and I’m still hungry, but there’s only one other one left and I don’t want to finish it. I’ve just washed up and I’m thinking about what to do about my clothes, if maybe I could wash them in the sink, and that’s when I hear the lock in the door behind me. Everything is all over the place—the Carver book and photos on the coffee table and my T-shirts all over the couch, and I try to clean it up a bit before she comes in, but it’s too late.

  “Hi there!”

  Her voice sounds happy, light, but I don’t turn around, focus on stuffing my clothes back in the bag.

  “Sorry it’s such a mess,” I go, “I’m just tidying up.”

  She laughs. “Believe me, this isn’t a mess. I’ve seen this place messy and you need to work a lot harder than that.”

  She sits down in the armchair by the window, kicks her sandals off and puts her feet on the table, so her toes curl over the edge. Her nails are painted silver but the polish is peeling. I can smell her feet.

  “Thank you for the muffin,” I go, “and the cream cheese.”

  “You’re welcome, I hope you ate both muffins, they’re very small.”

  “And for the lend of the clothes. I was going to put mine on but they’re dirty, so—”

  “We’ll have to do laundry,” she says. “There’s a laundromat on the next block.”

  I hear it, the “we,” but I pretend I don’t. I push the Duane Reade bag of dirty clothes down further in my backpack.

  “Are you feeling any better? I was worried, yesterday, when you slept so much. I called my friend Alistair, who’s a doctor, and he said you probably just had chronic fatigue, to let you sleep.”

  “I feel fine,” I go, “much better.”

  There are some things on the coffee table in between us and I wish I’d been smarter and packed them away first. Not your letters, Mum, they’re safely in the front pocket of the backpack, but I left my sketch pad out and the packet of photos and the Carver book. When I turn around, that’s what she has in her hand, and I can’t believe she’s just done that, reached over and picked up my book without even asking.

  “Raymond Carver,” she goes. “It’s a long time since I read Carver. I prefer his poetry. You’re a fan?”

  “He’s okay.”

  She turns the book over and I know your photo is going to fall out. I want to snatch the book back off her, but if I do that, she’ll know it’s important, so, instead, I roll up my Champion hoody. She pulls her glasses down from her hair and starts to read the back.

  “He was one of us,” she says, looking at me through her glasses.

  “One of us?”

  “You know, a friend of Bill’s.”

  She slides her glasses up her nose; she’s looking at me, waiting for me to say something.

  “You’re not an alcoholic, Lisa, are you?”

  I want to tell her the truth. “No, sorry. I don’t really like drinking, to tell you the truth.”

  I’m holding my breath, waiting for her response. She might be really mad, she might throw me out. That’s what I’m thinking, in the pause between me saying it and her reacting. I’m not expecting her to tip her head back and let out a loud, long laugh.

  Sometimes people laugh even when they’re annoyed. Sometimes, Dad laughed and seconds later he could be shouting or even crying. You can’t take it for granted that just because someone is laughing that they’re happy.

  “I’m sorry I lied, I had nowhere to go that night. It was raining. I thought there’d be coffee.”

  I’m trying to make an effort, to be honest, but it only makes her laugh more. She takes off her glasses, wipes her eyes.

  “I’m sorry, it’s just too funny. There are so many people in this city who need to get to a meeting and don’t, it’s just funny to think of someone being there who doesn’t even like to drink. And as I remember it, I was the one who invited you in.”

  The cat has come in from the bedroom, is standing in front of Winnie, sniffing the air. “There you are, I was wondering where you were, Olivia. This is Lisa. Lisa, this is Olivia.”

  It’s grating on me, the sound of the lie, every time she calls me Lisa, but I don’t want to say anything, not yet, not this soon after apologising for the other one. I don’t want her to think I’m a liar.

  The cat ignores Winnie, so she goes back to the Carver book, opens it. She looks at the back again. “Columbia University Library? Are you a student there?”

  “My mother was,” I go. “I might be going in the autumn. I mean, I’ve applied.”

  I didn’t think I was going to tell her that and as soon I do I wish that I hadn’t.

  “Good for you. When do you find out if you got in?”

  Olivia jumps up on the couch, then walks onto Winnie’s knee, standing so her tail is in her face. Winnie brushes it away.

  “I don’t know, I mean, they might have accepted me but I won’t be able to go anyway, even if they did.”

  Her face scrunch
es up. “Why not?”

  She’s asking too many questions but it’s my fault for bringing it up in the first place. “I’ve just missed a lot of school, that’s all. Even if my GPA is okay, I’ve missed too much to graduate.”

  Olivia sits down, gets up, turns, sits down again. Winnie winces, but she doesn’t make her move. I’m waiting for Winnie to say something about missing school, to talk about the importance of an education, but she doesn’t say anything. Instead she puts the Carver book back on the coffee table and reaches over to touch the edge of my sketch pad.

  “Can I take a look?”

  “Sure.”

  Olivia jumps down from her knee when she leans forward. Winnie flicks through the pages slowly, sometimes turning one to the side and back the right way around again. She stops, looks up at me. “These are good.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I like this one here, of the tree. You capture such detail, the texture of the bark.”

  I don’t need to look to know which one she means.

  “You have talent, Lisa.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m sure being an artist you must spend so much time drawing the city—there’s so much to be inspired by.”

  “I haven’t drawn anything since I got here.”

  She looks at me, her glasses sliding down her nose. Sergei was always on about that, how I should use drawing to make money, go to Times Square with a sketchbook. He didn’t get it when I said I hadn’t been able to draw since I got here. Winnie doesn’t say anything, just turns over the next page.

  “I’m an artist too, I like charcoal mostly, sketching.”

  “I like sketching too and painting sometimes. I like oils, acrylics.”

  “Maybe we can find you some stuff at the league,” she goes. “People are always leaving stuff behind.” There it is again, the “we.”

  “What’s the league?”

  “The Art Students’ League. I model there in return for some studio space.”

  “Model? As in nude modelling?” My tone is horrible and she hears it too. “I’m sorry, I—”

  “It’s okay,” she says, flattening down her blouse. “People are sometimes surprised, but you don’t have to have a young body to teach students how to draw.”

  Olivia is on the arm of the couch. She puts a paw on my bare leg, then another one. Her nails scratch a bit, but I don’t mind.

  “She likes you.” Winnie smiles. “She’s not normally that friendly.”

  “What’s it like, modelling? Having everyone see you, like that?”

  She tilts her head to one side, thinking before she answers. “It can be boring, definitely. But there’s something freeing about having people see you, exactly as you are. Not having to hide anything.”

  She catches my eye and I look away because I think this is where she’s going to bring it up, what happened in the soup kitchen yesterday, but she doesn’t.

  “I wouldn’t have been able to do it when I was younger. I’d have been getting into the heads of everyone else, wondering what they thought of me, but now, at my age, I couldn’t give a hoot.”

  Upstairs the violin music has started again and I feel myself stroking Olivia in time with it.

  “Is that your neighbour playing?”

  “Yes, that’s Francis, he’s a dear. Used to play at the Met. He minds Olivia whenever I’m away.”

  “Do you go away much?”

  “Not too often. Only in the summers when I’ve worked at a camp or once when I went to see Melissa, my daughter. She lives in Connecticut.”

  The pregnant daughter from the meeting. Now that I told her I lied about being an alcoholic it feels like I should pretend not to remember.

  Winnie reaches up to a shelf and takes down a photo in a glass frame. “There she is.”

  I think the photo is going to be of a woman, but it’s of a little girl on a bike, with a big smile and two missing front teeth. The bike has a basket and it’s full of sunflowers.

  “That’s a nice picture.”

  “I think so.” She looks at it. “It was a rare vacation we took, out of the city to Long Island, with my brother. He took the photo, I didn’t have a camera at the time.”

  She’s tracing her fingers over the glass, and I feel my legs, jerky as if I’m impatient, even though we’re not going anywhere.

  I say what I say next before I know I am going to. “Do you want to see a photo of my mum?”

  She puts the frame back down, smiles. “Sure.”

  Her eyes go to the packet on the table but the one I want to show her is in the Carver book. I open it to the right page, take out the Ziploc bag. I wish it had a frame too, but it doesn’t so I hold it by the edge and place it on the table in front of Winnie. “That’s my mum. When she was a student at Columbia.”

  She looks at the photo and then at me. “You look alike.”

  “We’ve different eyes.”

  “Different colour, yes, but you have the same kind of look too. The chin … ” She touches her own. “You have the same chin.”

  I move closer to her, lean in to see the photo. Your chin is turned to the side and it’s nice and slopey, nicer than mine.

  “She looks happy, doesn’t she?” I go. “In this photo, doesn’t she look like she was happy?”

  Winnie looks properly. Already I know she’s the kind of person who wants to look before she answers. She’s not just going to say it because I say it. Maybe that’s why I ask her. Maybe that’s why she’s the first person I show the photo to since I showed it to Laurie.

  “It’s a special photo,” she says. “It captures something about your mother, the essence of her.”

  I get up, move over to sit on the arm of her chair. Olivia rubs into my leg. “So you think she looks happy?”

  “She does look happy, but she looks more than that. She looks very real, you know, very alive.”

  I’m studying the picture, looking into your face, your eyes, examining the line of your hair along your jaw to see what Winnie sees.

  “She looks a lot like the woman at the soup kitchen yesterday who was looking for you. They could be sisters.”

  Dumbass. Laurie’s voice is in my head before mine. What was I thinking, showing her the photo of you? Did I think she wouldn’t see the resemblance? That she’d forget yesterday had happened?

  I stand up quickly, nearly stepping on Olivia. I take the photo back from Winnie, put it back in the Ziploc bag, put the bag back inside the Carver book.

  “Lisa?”

  I pick up my backpack. I want to pack it properly, nicely, but there isn’t time.

  “Lisa, what’s the matter?”

  I shove my jeans in, my Hendrix T-shirt. “I thought I could trust you, that’s what’s the matter.”

  She watches me packing, not smiling, but not mean-looking either.

  “You can, I just don’t know if I can trust you. You lied to me about who you are. I know your name’s not Lisa.”

  When she says that I stop packing, just for a second. She’s known my name was Rhea all along, since yesterday. Of course she knew.

  “So why’d you go along with it? Keep calling me Lisa, write that stupid note?”

  She shrugs. “I was waiting to see when you’d tell me the truth.”

  My stuff is nearly all packed. I’m still wearing her clothes but I can go into the kitchen, take them off and be out of this apartment, back on Ninth Avenue, in five minutes, less.

  “I had to lie, you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me.” Olivia is by my feet again, licking my big toe. Her tongue is rough and scratchy and kind of nice. Lisa had a cat but I never saw it lick anyone. “She seemed really upset, the woman who wanted to find you. Your aunt. She seemed concerned.”

  I stand there looking at Winnie, I don’t sit down. “I�
�m not going back there—I don’t care what anyone says. I’m not going back, you can’t make me! No one can make me!”

  Winnie stays sitting down, looking up at me. She doesn’t interrupt me. She doesn’t tell me to keep my voice down.

  “You’re right, I can’t make you go anywhere or do anything, no one can. But if you’re going to stay with me—that is, if you want to—you’re going to have to tell me the truth.”

  We stay like that for ages, it feels like, me standing, her sitting, Olivia in between. She makes it sound really simple, and maybe it is simple. I think about what she said about your photo, the Columbia one. She’d understood that, without me having to tell her, so maybe, just maybe she’ll understand this too.

  So I sit down on her couch and put my toes around the edge of the coffee table, just like her toes.

  “I don’t know where to start,” I go. “I don’t know where the beginning is.”

  She slides her glasses up her nose.

  “Start where you are, start at the end.”

  And I laugh, because it kind of makes sense, and she laughs too.

  And that’s where I start.

  I start at the end.

  Rhea

  Dear Mum,

  This is going to be the shortest letter ever because there’s only another fifteen minutes until my clothes will be dry and then I’ve got to bring them home and collect the sandwiches Winnie made and our art stuff and meet her at the jewellery shop where she works. She’ll be finished with her shift then and we’re getting the subway to Brooklyn, the A train. I’m writing this from the coolest little garden in the world by the way, down the block from the Laundromat. You need a key to get in and Winnie has a key because she’s a volunteer and I’m going to volunteer too, that’s one of the things I’ve decided.

  Today feels like a day for deciding things, it feels like the start of something. If I’d known it would feel like this, telling Winnie the truth, I wouldn’t have taken so long to get the whole story out, I wouldn’t have been so scared. Yesterday, sitting on her couch, it takes me ages to even get to the part about me and Laurie, and it’s nearly dark when I tell her about us kissing during Truth or Dare. Her face doesn’t change, even though she knows by then that Laurie is Cooper’s daughter, and it doesn’t even change when I tell her about us being in bed together. The only time in the whole story that her face changes is when I tell her about Cooper hitting me and the things he said. Her face gets really kind of hard then, like someone else’s face, and she shakes her head over and over and says she’s so sorry I’d had to go through that.