I think of Eva’s face and try hard to keep the image. It’s hard to remember a face, even when you sit down and concentrate. You can remember a scar, or a mole. But the rest is just outlines, or a certain look they gave you. Like Elliot, for example. I see him around sometimes, but I’m losing his face in my memory. I can remember the sculpture better than I can remember his face up close.
I wonder if I’ve really lost him, if he was something I let go of while swimming in the ocean the day of the fight, and now I can never get him back, because the ocean is way too big and I would not know where to start. I think of Eva and how sure she sounded when she said things never stay the same. How could that be Elliot I saw on the carousel—when I’m not even allowed to go in there, stop the horses, yank him off and away from another girl? He is not mine, but does that mean he’s gone? Can someone be right in front of you and just be gone?
I put the books back on the shelf and work my way down the alphabet, tracing the spines with my fingers. There are at least ten books about Picasso—the sculptures, the paintings, the biographies. I pick a book of portraits. If only I could take pictures that looked like this. Half profile, half frontal, orange and purple faces, faces with one eye open and the other shut. Photography is so limited, so rigid. Painters are the real face-makers. I would never forget a face that looked like this.
I want to study the book a little longer, but they’re going to close soon. At the desk, the lady tells me I need proof of residency to get a library card, and I nearly break into a sob. I just want to take the book home.
I show her my bus card, my pool card, my school ID, my expired driver’s permit. I recite my address and phone number at impressive speeds. When she starts to bite her lip and lower her eyes, I name every stop on the red Metro line from Bethesda to Silver Spring.
“My mom used to take me to the organ rehearsals at the Cathedral, down the street.”
She smiles, probably at my stubbornness, and, with the look of a girl who’s been flirted with, she hands me a card.
“Enjoy your book,” she says.
This sweater weather cleans everything up, and I’m almost convinced I can handle whatever is coming, that I’m strong enough. I take out my camera, but instead of taking a picture, I look at the altar photo again. I’m not erasing it. Eva doesn’t have to know. The book is heavy and awkward in my tote, but the day is almost done. The meeting with Ms. K is over. At least I have one less lie to keep track of.
Walking home, I stop at a light next to a woman with a giant belly. Only one of her coat buttons is fastened, and she is patting her bump gently. We walk across the street together, and I hang back so it won’t be awkward. She’s going the same way I’m going. She’s probably coming home from work, and I imagine her husband kissing her on the cheek, bringing her a glass of water, maybe drawing circles around their future baby.
As she turns the corner, presumably onto her street, I remember my period hasn’t come, but I have no husband. Elliot will not teach this baby about good music. Elliot will not fall asleep with this baby on his chest.
My hands reach for my belly before I can stop them, feeling for a bump. There’s nothing but the usual, reasonable bit of chub. It’s still soft. Nobody would guess anything was preparing to grow in there. The more I indulge, the more I
realize that I’ve crossed a line—or better, a wall—in my mind, and it becomes a little more impossible to return to denial.
I wish my most persistent thoughts could be like the foamy fat floating in one of Mom’s long-simmering soups, that I could skim them off with a shallow wooden spoon and enjoy my dinner like nothing gross was ever there, only what’s good for me. When I get home, I brush my shoes on the welcome mat before going inside, even if they’re clean, even if I know I’ll take them off as soon as I walk in. When the door shuts behind me, she’s there, in her jeans, my Sarah, my mother. Her hands are orange and sticky.
“I’m carving,” she says.
“For Halloween,” I say.
“Yup,” she says, and her face softens into a question I can’t answer yet.
I sit next to her in the kitchen and watch her make the eyes first, then the crooked teeth and finally scraping it all clean. When she’s done, she sets it on our bench, on top of an old magazine.
At dinner, we make fun of her outburst in Ms. K’s office, and Dad asks if he can see the two pictures I was talking about. Mom smirks and explains my rules to him, and he looks as if he understands. After washing the dishes, my mom lays out the newspaper and takes out the knife. It’s the first time in months I feel like the daughter they might have been missing.
Dad gives me a kiss on top of my head before going to bed and asks if I want to read Captains Courageous, the book he used to read to me as a kid. I can’t tell if it’s a joke, but he waves me off playfully before I get the chance to ask, a nostalgic look in his eyes. I tell him he’ll have to find it first, and he says maybe he will.
Upstairs, in my bed, I try to remember what the walls used to look like before I took everything down. Nothing ever stays the same. The book of Neruda poems is on the floor where I left it. I read the last one: “The Song of Despair.”
“You swallowed everything, like distance. / Like the sea, like time.”
I open the window and the air rushes in to bite me.
twenty
PABLO.
twenty-one
I wake up from the smell at first. Then I feel the warmth between my legs, and that’s when I see the stain on my bed. I stumble to the bathroom, take everything off, and throw my underwear in the trash. The blood is dark red, darker than I remembered it. I look through the cabinets for a tampon and don’t even bother to use soap when I rinse my hands. There it is, I think in the mirror. No baby.
I thought what I would feel was huge, unmistakable relief. It’s different though. I’m embarrassed to say it feels lonely, and hard. No baby. No husband. No heroic purpose in life. It’s just me, the way I wasn’t before. On the way back up from the dryer, with a new pair of underwear and sweats on, I see the pumpkin is now on our porch.
I find a fresh tea light in the junk drawer and light it with the Shabbat matches. I open the door slowly, so I won’t wake anybody up. I usually leave from the garage for my night prowls, and opening the front door seems more dangerous. I say a silent blessing in my head for the dirty underwear, for myself, for my Mom who is upstairs worrying about things she can’t imagine. I lift the pumpkin lid and place the flame in there. It’s cold on the porch, in the dark, four days before Halloween. I peer through the jack-o’-lantern’s eyes to watch the orange shadows. It’s spooky and soothing at the same time. I remember the way this felt when I was a kid, like some kind of magic was being released, the kind that would scare children on any other day.
Halloween was incredible. It meant I could hold my dad’s hand in the dark and let it go at every house, running toward the candy as they watched and waited for me to come back. I could be an insect, a planet, a warty witch. It meant we could play with death a little, take charge of our greatest fears as we walked around with fake guts and fake blood and fake teeth and fake swords. We could be bad guys without feeling guilty or scared. All kinds of exiled creatures could come out and play. My own mommy could carve mean eyes with a butcher knife and all the kids would squeal in delight.
Before getting back into bed, I check my phone and see Eva’s response again.
PABLO.
That’s what she loves. Not poetry, not music, not even her mother. Pablo. She sounded desperate on the phone this morning. I start to think up all kinds of horrors. Why does she want to see the boy so badly? What’s making her so afraid? Why wouldn’t she just stay with him? I consider calling the police, but that would be impossible. I don’t even know her last name, and I couldn’t really explain why or how I know her aunt’s address. Anyway, the police don’t come because you’re imagining things,
and if Eva’s family hasn’t found her yet, they must trust her, or not care. Maybe they kicked her out themselves.
I imagine what Pablo might look like, whether his hair is black like Eva’s, if he speaks Spanish or English or both, like the poems Neruda wrote. I think of that last poem I read:
“Oh the mad coupling of hope and force / in which we merged and despaired.”
Hope and force, hope and fear, hope and loss—hope being the superhero, the tea light in the orange pumpkin. With hope and force, I take twenty dollars out of our money box and call for a cab to come pick me up a block from here. On the way out, I pick up the jack-o’-lantern. The cab driver is listening to the radio in a foreign language, oblivious to my age, my pajamas, my pumpkin cargo. We ride across the city and it only takes ten minutes to get to Eva’s house.
He waits inside the car as I step out quickly and put the jack-o’-lantern on top of their porch steps, the tea light still inside. Maybe one day I’ll have a kid who will look through the carved eyes, but not now, and it won’t be Elliot’s. This one’s for Pablo. Here it is, little guy: the world is a scary wonder.
In the car, the driver is arguing on the phone, so he doesn’t mind when I ask if he can wait a second before going back home and whether it would be all right to roll down my window. He just nods. It’s cold. I pull out Bogart, aim from inside the car, and take a picture of my pumpkin on Pablo’s steps.
twenty-two
r u awake?
YUP.
getting colder?
YUP.
where r u?
YOU?
on my way home. got a picture.
SUPER. IT’S LATE.
i know. i read the song of despair.
GOOD ONE.
how do you say that in spanish?
WHAT?
despair.
DESESPERANZA.
and hope?
ESPERANZA.
aha. despair = without hope.
YOU GOT IT.
not me. you?
NEVER.
twenty-three
My breath sputters in the morning chill. I’m waiting for my dad to bring the car around, because he takes pride in being a gentleman. My mom is still inside looking for the house keys. I am standing right where the pumpkin was yesterday, hoping she won’t notice, trying to keep it cool. Mom bursts through the door with her wool coat unbuttoned. Dad honks and she sticks out her tongue.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hey. Let’s go,” she says. “We’re all late.”
We hurry into the car, and, after a little back and forth, they decide it’s best to drop me off first. We ride through Rock Creek, on the parkway, where the leaves are on fire and the joggers are already wearing hats. This is really my favorite time of year. I eat my re-heated bagel to make Mom happy. It’s so chewy that my jaw keeps clicking. I can tell Dad’s doing his best not to turn the radio on, that he wants to give us room to talk.
“It’s so pretty,” my mom says. “We should all go for a hike this weekend.”
“Sure,” Dad says. “What do you think, bean?”
“A hike would be nice,” I say.
“Hey bean, you want me to pick you up today?” he says, taking his eyes off the road to look back at me in the mirror.
“No thanks, Dad. I can take the bus.”
“You sure? I could sneak out of work early for a day.”
“Don’t worry, Dad. I’ll take the bus.”
“With Adam?” he asks.
“No,” I say, “by myself.”
The rest of the ride, we sit in silence, and he turns around to pat my knee when it’s time to go in.
“Go get ’em, bean. I’ll see you tonight.”
Mom blows me a kiss.
“Thanks for the ride,” I tell them, resolving to go buy another pumpkin and carve an identical face.
“My pleasure,” he says, and they wait until I’m out of sight to leave and finally turn on the morning news.
It’s early, so I grab a cup of coffee in the cafeteria, which I haven’t done since last year, pre-Elliot. “Hey Miriam!” says Stella. “Yo, Miriam,” barks Jason. Victor nods. Elle waves. Rachel walks backwards and reminds me of a Students For Sudan meeting she thinks I would “dig.” The faces thrown aside by my relationship with Elliot are coming back like happy, unoffended ghosts. No one seems to mind that I went under water for a year. They moved on. Elliot’s with Maggie now. For all intents and purposes, I’m back.
I have five minutes.
While I change my tampon, some girls walk into the bathroom blaring a techno song. Their voices sound vaguely familiar, but I can’t tell with the song so loud.
“Oh my God, I love this one,” one of them squeaks.
“It’s a remix of an old song by this jazz singer. It’s AMAZING.”
I hide in the stall, hoping I can finish my business before we get to the amazing part. Oh man. It’s Nina Simone. They went and remixed Nina Simone. It makes me incredibly sad, so sad I just sit there, waiting for it to end. Maybe they will play something decent next, something that doesn’t feel like your soul is getting whipped by a synthetic snare drum.
Halfway through, I give up and open the door. Maggie and two other girls are standing by the sink. Something in my chest collapses, like a butterfly chair. And all of my breath goes to that space, runs through it and gets sucked in before it can ever get to the other side. The girls look away immediately, but Maggie smiles a little, the thick pink soap in her hand.
We all wash our hands while the excruciating song wraps up. I let them walk out first, and give them a few minutes to get a head start. Elliot—the guy who brought me to see music I could hardly stand it was so good, the one who lugs a massive string instrument into this building every Wednesday. Elliot—the boy who lies on his carpet and holds my hand through three albums in Icelandic. That Elliot has fallen in love with a girl who thinks nothing of murdering a beautiful song, a girl who isn’t too snobby or proud to say hello to me, a girl who most definitely doesn’t steal her mother’s jack-o’-lantern. Elliot has fallen in love with a nice, lighthearted girl who will not drown him in a painful, metaphorical ocean.
Everything in my body is a little off balance. My right arm is longer than my left, my hip is sharp against my jeans, my face is cold on one side and hot on the other. All the organs and limbs are answering to some random role call in no particular order. I’m here, the spleen says; don’t forget me, the heel cries; keep me safe, the mind orders. I shush them as soon as they make themselves known, but there is no way out of this. This body is mine. I can’t crawl out of it and leave it limp on the linoleum. I’m going to have to carry it down the hall, into the chair, behind the table, and all the way through everything I do from now on.
I. Am. Still. Here.
twenty-four
Comparative Literature, Modern European History, Free, Lunch, Theory of Knowledge, Calculus. I promised I would not skip class. During my free period, I take my laptop outside to the Cave. The Cave is the place people go when they want to be left alone. It’s the campus blind spot. Every high school has one.
Adam and I came here to take secret portraits, our first experiment in guerrilla photography. I wanted to be a documentarian, like Dorothea. Adam wanted to find the Americans, like Robert Frank. He said this is where people hide, and the only thing people hide is the truth, and man did we love the truth. Back then I was always looking for people and their insides. I wanted to find their dreams and name their pain, like the portraits in yesterday’s books. Now I wait until everyone’s asleep and snap up the leftovers, like a vulture.
We called our subjects “pilgrims,” and justified our breach of ethics by telling ourselves we were documenting our times: anxious, hopeful, lonely. We came out here three of four times a week for almost a year. It’s basically what we did wit
h the second half of freshman year.
Some days we would get nothing, and other days we’d walk back with real treasures, too giddy or guilty to even boast. Hunter, the badass, reading Harry Potter and smoking Lucky Strikes. Justin cheating on Sammy with the smartest girl in our grade. Kalima rolling out a prayer mat on a bed of rotting leaves. Carla making small cuts above her ankle with a bright pink Bic blade.
Miriam, art vandal and pumpkin thief, I sit on our rock, open up my laptop, and start typing. I am officially a pilgrim.
Dear Mom and Dad,
First of all, I would like to say sorry for everything I’ve put you through. After all, you did push me on the swing, and you gave me my first camera, and you paid for me to go to a school where the counselor gives you tea and knows when you skipped one class. I know I’ve been a bit of a shmuck lately and here is why.
Try again.
Dear Mom and Dad,
Remember this summer when I came home early from Elliot’s house? And I called you from the station and you asked me what happened and when I said nothing you just asked me what I needed? That was really great. I really appreciate that. I was so scared and it smelled pretty bad on the train and my bathing suit was still wet from the ocean and all I wanted to do was get home. You guys looked so tired when you picked me up. And then we got some Lebanese food and we ate and you asked me a million unrelated questions and I just told you we broke up and Mom asked why and Dad, you said, we don’t have to know why, it doesn’t matter why, and I was so jealous of you because you are a man.
Not quite.
Mom and Dad,
I’m trying to tell you the truth about everything because I literally don’t think my body can take it anymore, but I don’t know where to start. You know the Picasso sculpture at the Hirshhorn? Well, I knocked it down. That’s why I was late to the bus. I don’t think it broke. Anyway, this girl saw me do it and I went to meet her because I was lonely, I think, and scared and so so angry. It’s nothing you guys did. Really. I was just feeling like you were looking for me all the time, and not finding me, like I was hiding in some closet and you wanted to yank me out. But I was there the whole time, Mom. I am still your Miriam. Do you see that?
Where You End Page 12