by May-Lan Tan
Ghosts
She’s scraping leftovers onto a porcelain plate. “Are you bringing a bag?”
“No. Just my gym bag.” I tear off a sheet of plastic film and hand it to her.
She stretches it over the pieces of wilted meat. Her nails are freshly clipped, the edges crisp and hexagonal.
“So yes,” she says, smoothing down the edges of the film. “You mean yes, but you like to say no.” She smiles, showing teeth. The black tiles behind her reflect the track lighting as hundreds of brilliant dots.
“What are we talking about?”
“A gym bag’s a bag.” She puts the plate in the fridge.
I touch my stomach under my t-shirt. “You never know, tonight might be relaxing.”
“Staying here is relaxing.” The fridge door’s closed, but she’s still holding the handle.
“Think of it as our bedroom, just halfway across town.”
“Doesn’t that defeat the purpose?”
“We can’t put it off again. Our session’s on Monday.”
“I know,” she says. “Do you think I don’t know?”
The hotel room is pale gray with violet accents and a view that takes up an entire wall. AJ opens the closet door. She’s tall and brisk in her stretchy tank dress and basketball shoes. She used to have long hair that was calm and sleepy, but she recently had it lopped into a cartoonish bob that ruffles with her movements.
“What do you expect you’ll find in there?” I ask.
“I like to know how much space we have.” She closes it.
“You never use it.”
“I might.”
She walks around, playing with the lighting. I start unpacking my bag onto the desk. Tonight is Dr. Barry’s idea. He’s not even really a doctor. We’ve been going to him ever since AJ found out I’d been seeing a professional domme. The domme’s name is Satine. She’s been in the picture much longer than AJ. She was my first and only top. The sex was perfect but the love was bad, a Möbius strip.
AJ comes over to touch things. She finds the bubble bath I brought. “Why did you bring shampoo?”
I tell her it’s bubble bath.
“You went out and bought this? For tonight?” She twists off the cap and sniffs the contents.
“Isn’t that what people do?”
She puts the bottle down. “I’m just surprised.”
The bottom rows of her lashes are as thick as stitches. I kiss her on the mouth. She locks in, keeps it going for a while. We open our eyes.
“OK,” I say. “Let’s do this.”
We switch off our phones. As the beeping subsides, I wonder which is better: to apologize for our being stuck here, or to thank her for coming.
“Maybe something good will happen,” I say.
As a child, she had fallen out of a tree, cutting her face on one of its branches. The scar is still visible in certain light. It deepens when she smiles.
Music plays in the elevator. I think it’s the theme song of an old TV show. We watch the floor numbers lighting.
“My residence halls were just around the corner from here,” she says.
The elevator opens. We cross the lobby and push the doors. It’s a hot, clear night. The sky is embedded with cold bright chips of light.
“What do you think Dr. Barry expects us to say tonight that we haven’t already said?” AJ says as we head up the road.
“We have to stop calling him that. I almost said it to his face the other day.”
“Do you think he knows he looks like Barry Manilow?”
“He must. I think he tries to accentuate it.”
“It may be the reason I’ve trusted him from the beginning,” she says.
I watch her hair bouncing. When she had it cut, it made me sad because I thought she might have been punishing herself with fantasies about what Satine looks like. She has meticulously avoided the subject. I think she imagines someone lush and obvious, pneumatic. Satine’s in her fifties and looks like a violin teacher. I chose her specifically because I hadn’t found her tight, polished face too appealing in the photos. I thought I’d be less likely to become infatuated. You’d think AJ would be pleased if she knew this, but it would probably slay her. She’s very threatened by unbeautiful women who have power over men.
There are no cars on the cross streets. We walk past dimmed shop glass and the uplit lobbies of office buildings. In one, a watchman sits on a swivel chair by the doors.
“Have you ever had a truly menial job?” AJ asks me, as we walk beneath a net of trees.
“I worked in a potato-chip factory. I’m sure I’ve told you.”
“I like it when you tell me things,” she says.
“I had to wear a see-through shower cap and stare at chips going by on a conveyor belt. My job was to pick out the ones that looked too burned. I kept seeing Marc Bolan’s face on the chips, stenciled in barbecue powder.”
“How old were you?”
“Sixteen,” I say. “What were you doing?”
“I was still at school, smoking incredibly thin roll-ups.”
I smile at her. As we cross under the railway bridge, the steel track shivers with the premonition or the memory of a distant train.
“Why have I never seen marks?” she says.
It’s been like this lately. I finally figured out that there’s a conversation progressing in her head all the time, and every so often, she tunes me in.
“She was careful,” I say. Satine wore a glove when she spanked me. She rubbed ointment on my skin to soften it before she whipped me. Most of the marks went away after a few hours. I took vitamins.
AJ cuts me a sideways glance. “Is that why you do kickboxing?”
“What?”
“In case you ended up with a black eye? Do you even have kickboxing?”
“Of course.”
“God.” She leans forward, as if braving weather.
“I’m sorry.”
“Stop saying that. I’ve already forgiven you.”
“Let’s talk about the concept of forgiveness.”
“Fuck you,” she says, “and fuck Dr. Barry. That man is making money from our inertia.”
A car zooms past, the sound underlining her words.
“I’m starting to worry it’s not in my nature,” she says after a while.
“To forgive?”
“Do you really think people change?”
We stop walking and look at each other. “No,” I say, “they don’t change. They just keep their promises.”
She scrunches her face. “What does that mean? You’ll still have those feelings?”
“Stop calling it feelings. What did you think would happen, Dr. Barry would wave a wand and I wouldn’t be a masochist anymore?”
“What will you do?”
“I’ll take care of it by myself, like I did before. What did you expect me to do?”
“I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”
“I’ll still be me. I’ll be wired the same way.”
“Now whenever I go out, I’ll think you’re hurting yourself.”
“Think whatever you want,” I say.
“I’ve told you there won’t be anyone else. The rest is private, OK?”
“Do you think the sessions are doing us any good?”
I flinch, and hate myself for it.
“I meant with Dr. Barry.”
“Have I ever missed an appointment?”
“It’s not—penance, is it? You really think he can help us?”
“Do you?”
The look in her eyes is like wading through a lake, the way the silt gets kicked up. “Ready to turn around?”
We start to walk back. I see our hotel in the distance, its bone-white lamps and purplish interiors exposed. AJ walks slightly ahead of me, holding herself in a bristling, exoskeletal way. I look at her legs, the long blades of her muscles sharpening. I think of the night we met, at this fucking awful party on a roof. She had just come back from Estonia, where she’d been
living on a farm.
It was a sort of kibbutz, as far as I could understand, in quite a remote area. There was a bike, and every day she rode into the pine forest. She saw snakes and frogs and rabbits, and creatures she didn’t recognize: one that looked like a cowboy hat, and a strange type of deer with stubby legs and big floppy ears. I could see her spacing out as she spoke about it.
At the edge of the forest was a pale green shore, on which cows grazed and drank straight from the sea. She said the Baltic’s so dilute the grass grows all the way to its edge. She took off her clothes and swam out. She did this every day. It was autumn. The water was so chilly she could feel her heart beating slower and slower. When it felt like it had almost stopped, she would swim back to the bank and lie on a big flat rock.
One afternoon she was drying on the rock, and she felt a thread of sunlight inside her chest. She had never believed in the existence of a soul except in abstract terms, yet she felt this, and she knew it was her soul. She wasn’t planning to do anything with it; she just liked knowing it was there. When she told me this story, I immediately began to picture myself with her, so I never used to like it when she told it to anyone else. Later, I realized no one else understands what the story’s about. Everyone seems to think it’s about religion, but what it really means is that she knows how to be alone.
When we reach the hotel, she holds the door and gives me a soft look. Her shoulders are gold. We cross the lobby and step into the elevator. We turn and face our blurred reflections in the metal doors. I picture myself alone in our apartment, eating in front of the TV. The doors open and another couple gets in.
“We’re going up,” we tell them.
They shrug and smile. They seem Italian. When the elevator stops on our floor, we say goodbye to them and walk down the corridor. AJ swipes the key card and we go inside.
The lights come on with a pop. She goes into the bathroom and shuts the door.
I see the bubble bath on the desk and an image of myself buying it. I look at the mirrored shells of the buildings across the street and listen to the spatter of the shower. The air vent blows on my face, and I start to feel I’m standing by a hotel window in the future, looking back on this night and seeing it compressed into a flash. The water shuts off. I wait for her to come out, her skin steaming.
New Jersey
They’re out of breath when they reach Erin’s building, but they run up the stairs.
“Ow,” Jimmy says, pressing her ribs and laughing. She does track, so this should be nothing, but she smoked two cigarettes at the gig. They get five minutes’ grace period before Erin’s dad bolts the front door. If they have to ring the bell, Erin’s grounded for a month. No negotiating. When they reach the top landing, Erin already has her key out. She turns it in the lock and the door clicks open.
“Phew.”
“I know.”
They take off their shoes and leave them outside on the rack. The hall light is on and her parents’ door is open. Erin goes to talk to them.
Jimmy stops in the bathroom to wash the Sharpie x’s off the backs of her hands. She doesn’t have a curfew, but they never stay at hers because she lives up at the far corner of Hoboken and shares a room with little twin sisters who never shut up. Erin lives six blocks from the station and has a queen-size bed. She says Jimmy’s lucky, but Jimmy thinks curfews are nice, in a way. It means someone else is the adult.
The ink isn’t coming off. Even though Erin didn’t get x’ed tonight, she didn’t try to get served; she never risks it unless they’re in some nowhere dive. She’s honestly the only person Jimmy knows who can pull off a fake ID. At seventeen, Erin looks fourteen, but she always wears a full face of makeup and a push-up bra and dresses neck to toe in black, so the glamour quotient kind of throws it off. Jimmy has never worn a bra of any kind, and she’s had her period twice so far. She hopes some of Erin’s girlness will rub off on her. She dries her hands and goes to Erin’s room.
The walls are covered in Megadeth and Slayer posters, and the floor with tatami matting. They only have it in the bedrooms; the rest of the apartment has the oatmeal-colored carpet with map shapes, like everyone has. Erin’s dad teaches oceanography at Stevens. Their family moved here from Japan when Erin was nine. She and Jimmy were new at school the same year. They were both small for their age and flunking fourth grade, since Erin barely spoke English and Jimmy barely spoke. They used to swap lunches and smile at each other. Though they still trade panda rice balls for PBJ, some things have changed. Jimmy’s grown by maybe a foot and a half, Erin aced the mock SATs, and they’re metalheads now.
Tonight they saw Maiden play the Ritz, though they told Erin’s parents it was Pearl Jam. Occasionally Erin’s dad, who goes to Trinity Lutheran, flips out and rips up Erin’s band posters, and Erin gets really mad and depressed. Then her mom, who’s a Buddhist, buys her all new ones and she’s allowed to keep them for a while.
Erin comes in and turns on the paper lamp by her bed and moves it down next to Jimmy. She clicks off the overhead light and kisses Bruce Dickinson on one of the band posters.
“I want to have your babies,” she tells him. She locks the door and slides under her bed like a car mechanic. “Can you believe they played four encores?”
“Yah, epic,” Jimmy says.
Erin emerges with the small flat bottle of vodka and two shot glasses she keeps taped to the underside of the bed-spring. She pulls off all the tape and pours them each a shot. Normally she carries a hip flask and when they come back from the city, they go to the park on the pier to drink and look across the water at where they’ve been, but she knew they’d get frisked at the concert.
They clink glasses and Jimmy takes a sip. Erin knocks the whole thing back and doesn’t even make a face. She really likes to drink, and she taught Jimmy how. Once you realize it isn’t meant to taste good, it starts to taste good. She tops off Jimmy’s glass, pours herself another, and tosses it back. She takes off her jacket and stretches out on the floor. She has a perfect peanut body, small and tanned and curvy.
Whenever Jimmy says she’s bored, Erin says, Wanna make out? and Jimmy says, Sure. They laugh, but sometimes Jimmy imagines how it would be. She’s not a dyke, right—she tested it. There’s a magazine in the staff bathroom at work, and the pictures make her wet, but if she checks out real girls in the locker room, she doesn’t feel a thing. And it’s not like she loves Erin or wants to date her. It’s more because she’s almost seventeen and has never done anything and girls just seem so much cleaner. When Jimmy needs to make herself come, she can never imagine it with a guy. She has to pretend another girl’s body is in front of her body and she’s kissing her neck and feeling her tits and rubbing her, instead of herself. It’s not Erin, but it could be Erin. Plus Erin has a sort-of boyfriend, which makes it definitely not gay.
Jimmy closes her eyes and tips her drink down her throat, feeling her stomach close like a fist. She tucks her knees to her chest and hugs them.
“So if I had your eyes and height, but my body and mouth,” Erin is saying, “and I grew my hair down to there, and had bangs, but not stupid ones, then guys would have to look at me.”
“They look at you now,” Jimmy says.
“And I want a real ass. I have a flat ass.” Erin rolls onto her stomach and pours herself another shot. She downs it, arching her back, and wipes her mouth with her knuckles. “Well, OK, it’s not so much flat as low. I think it dropped when I had mono. All I did was lie in bed for like a year. I lost hella muscle tone.”
“It looks good that way. Like an upside-down heart.”
“Hmm,” Erin says. She sits up and fills their glasses. “I can’t believe they didn’t play ‘Killers.’”
“Or ‘Seventh Son of a Seventh Son.’”
Erin sings the guitar riff. There’s a tap on the door. Jimmy’s nearer the bed, so she shoves her shot glass and the bottle underneath it. Erin downs hers, drops the glass down her top, and reaches up to turn the doorknob so the button pops o
ut. “It’s open,” she calls, winking at Jimmy.
“Go to sleep,” her mom says through the door.
“OK.” Erin reaches over and turns off the lamp.
“Good night, Jimmy,” Erin’s mom says.
“Night, Mrs. Ando.”
They crawl into bed and stifle their giggles until they hear the door close at the end of the hall.
“Tonight was the best,” Erin whispers, sitting up and pulling her shirt up over her head.
Staying under the blanket, Jimmy takes off her jeans and drops them on the floor. She isn’t wearing anything under her tank top so she leaves it on.
Erin lies back down. “Don’t you hate how just when our lives are getting good, we’re going to be split up?”
“We have a whole year,” Jimmy says, “and we’ll always be friends.”
“It’ll be different after high school. We’ll have totally different lives.”
“Our lives are different now, and we’re still best friends.”
“You know what I mean. I’ll be at college, and you’ll be in the army.”
“But then we’ll both have jobs and we’ll be the same again,” Jimmy says. In the darkness she can see the white of Erin’s bra. “You know I still have my shot under the bed.”
“Wanna split it?”
“You have it.” Jimmy folds her arms behind her head. “I have work tomorrow. I’m worried I’ll smell.”
“Vodka doesn’t have a smell.”
“It does. It’s sweet.”
Erin crawls to the bottom of the bed, does the shot, and crawls back up. She lies right against Jimmy’s side.
“We’ll make it the best year,” Jimmy tells her. “We’ll go to all the gigs.”
“Yah. White Zombie’s playing the Plaza New Year’s Eve. And Pantera’s touring, but I don’t know if they have New York dates.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Jimmy says, “we can go out of state. One of the waitresses just had a baby, and me and this other girl are splitting her shifts until she comes back. I’ll be able to buy my car by the end of summer.” She can smell Erin’s conditioner.