Little Stalker

by Jennifer Belle

  Instead, I found a cup on the bathroom sink, filled to the brim with Mrs. Katz’s urine. No one had asked her to do that. I stared into the urine trying to figure out how I had gotten here. Once I had thrown a coin into the blue-lit Fontana di Trevi in Rome when I was on my Italian book tour. Once I had ridden in a gondola on the Grand Canal and trailed my fingers in the water, swearing to myself that I would one day touch that water again. Now I was staring into a small cup of urine. Now I was wrapping a paper towel around a small cup of urine, and dumping it into the toilet.

  14.

  At 33, she models for a national Absolut vodka ad

  The next morning I skipped Little House because it was the episode where Laura’s dog Jack dies after she is mean to him, and I didn’t feel like crying my eyes out, so I got to the office early.

  As soon as I got there, my father asked me where the pictures of my brain were.

  “I don’t know,” I said. The scraps of the MRI films, left over from my valentine to Arthur Weeman, were still in my unemptied wastepaper basket.

  "Did you file them in X-rays?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “Well, they’re not there. I’m going to have you get another MRI soon, and I want to keep close track of the tumor.”

  “I’m sure they’ll turn up,” I said. I wondered what Arthur Weeman had done with it. It might be in a pile on his desk touching an early draft of his next screenplay or tossed in the garbage in his kitchen with his tea bags or . . . And then I started to panic. What if he had shown them to a doctor? What if my own brain betrayed me? I had just assumed that to Arthur Weeman’s untrained eye it would simply look distinctive, like a beauty mark, like the mole above Cindy Crawford’s upper lip. But what if someone told him it was a tumor and a tumor in an older brain, and he saw me as some kind of sociopath?

  “Uh, Dad,” I asked, casually, “does the brain of a thirty-year-old woman look different from the brain of a thirteen-year-old girl?”

  “Depends,” my father said. “Your brain certainly hasn’t developed much beyond a thirteen-year-old’s. When you were thirteen all you wanted to do was watch that saccharine television program, Little Prairie House. Now, please, look for those films. Maybe they’re in my office. This whole place is a pigsty. God, I can’t bear it.”

  I went into his office and sat in his burgundy leather chair. I opened up his desk drawers and pretended to search for my brain, riffling through his files, all labeled in Irmabelle’s square handwriting, all letters, even the L’s, the exact same height.

  The red light of line 2 blinked on the phone, and I heard my father requesting new films. “I need duplicates of a patient’s scans. Fine, I’ll hold if I must,” I heard him say.

  I flipped through the files. Dermatologists, DES, Diet Plans, Drug Rehabs, Eisenberg—taxes current, Elephants, Encephalitis . . .

  I kept flipping forward but my mind had stopped on Elephants.

  I pulled out the file called Elephants, opened it and found a school photo of a little girl, about eight or nine, against an artificial bright blue background. The image was repeated four times, four of the same photo on one sheet, meant to be carefully cut and distributed to grandparents. She was a light-skinned black girl, wearing a pink batik dress with a large butterfly on the front, antennae curling toward the scooped neck. Her hair was in perfect, natural ringlets, like a piece of machinery exploding into a cloud of springs. I figured her parents had given my father the picture because he had helped her and they were grateful. I didn’t know what it had to do with elephants.

  There was only one other item in the file, a yellowed clipping from The New York Times. I was eager to read it because it was probably an article about how my father had saved the little girl.

  I turned the clipping over, and there in front of me, was an enormous photo of my father holding the hand of a curly-haired little girl who was pointing up at an elephant. I stared at the photo, and then lowered my eyes to the caption.

  The circus comes to town. Dr. Frederick Kettle and his daughter welcome the elephants.

  So, he had been right, I thought, I had seen the elephants. I was young in the picture, no more than nine or ten, but it was strange that I didn’t remember. I stared at myself in the grainy photo. I was wearing a gray wool princess coat with Persian lamb cuffs, fancy.

  “Goddamnit, I’ve already been on hold a long time,” I heard my father say. “Damn Christmas season.”

  I tried so hard to remember being in that picture that I suddenly could. I could feel my father’s hand holding my mittened one, the soft cuffs of the coat against my wrists, the elephant, and the nice man from The New York Times asking if he could take our picture. But then I noticed my hair again. It was curly. And my hair had simply never been that curly. But the little black girl wearing the butterfly dress in the other photo, the school photo, her hair was curly.

  And then I realized that the date on the newspaper was the date, twenty years ago, that my father had moved out of our house.

  It was a Sunday. My father had gone to see a patient. My mother opened our front door in her nightgown and picked The New York Times up off of the doormat. The reason I remembered the date was because it was my best friend Jenny Newman’s birthday and she was having a theater party, six girls seeing a matinee on Broadway, front-row center. My father came home and I remember the paper sailing past him, just missing him, the way on a drive in the country once, a wild turkey had flown low across the road, just missing our windshield. It wasn’t unusual for my mother to throw something, so I had never connected the newspaper with the reason they divorced.

  And then I realized, as the red light on line 2 stopped blinking, that my father had another daughter, and I had a little sister.

  My mother knew and had never told me. She had read about it in The New York Times. If it was in the Times and my mother had seen it, other people must have seen it too. I wondered how many other people knew I had a sister.

  You have two sisters, the psychic kinesthesiologist had told me. One was aborted. And the other one wasn’t.

  I quickly shut the file with the clipping in it and the sheet of photos and shoved it back in its place. I closed the desk drawer and stood up.

  “Don’t bother looking anymore. I ordered duplicates,” he said, wandering into the doorway. “Is something wrong?”

  “You ordered duplicates?” I felt dizzy and I steadied myself with my hands on his desk for a minute.

  “That’s right,” my father said. “Are you okay?”

  “Duplicates?” My father’d had an affair and it had been productive. I managed to get out from around his desk. “It’s always good to have two of everything.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “You’ve never been particularly organized.”

  Was she? I wondered.

  “I’m going to go out for a few minutes,” I said.

  “Okay, Toots.” And with total concentration, as if I were walking the highwire and not the familiar worn-out carpet, I made it out of there.

  I stood on the sidewalk for several minutes, trying to decide what to do. I’d left my Paul Revere coat in the office closet and I was cold. I thought about taking a cab home but instead I decided to walk for a block or two. As I turned the corner onto Third Avenue, I saw a terrible thing. A dog was running loose in the street. Cars swerved and I stopped, frozen. Other people were standing around too, unable to do anything. The dog ran frantically back and forth. “Please help him,” I screamed. I started shaking. “Help him!” The dog stopped for a second and I thought it might come to me. Without thinking, I ran into the middle of the street. But it shot off up the avenue and was gone.

  New York suddenly seemed like the most dangerous place on earth, with panicked dogs and elephants everywhere, and stupid people standing around. That’s what I got for avoiding that morning’s sadness on Little House—I had to see this dog and learn that I had a sister. A sister I
would have done anything not to have.

  When I knew my father was gone for the day, I went back to the office and looked at the wall of charts. I stood in front of the K’s. Katz, Kaufman—A, Kaufman—J, Kawalski, Kazinksy, Kellerman, Kelley, Kesterman, Ketch, Kettle—R, Kettle—S.

  Kettle—S.

  Slowly, I pulled out the chart, which was thick, three times as thick as my own, I noticed.

  I sat down at Irmabelle’s desk, and, through lab reports and the tight impossible handwriting of our father, got to know my little sister. Her name was Sascha and she was three years younger than me. She’d had the mumps and chicken pox, lice and poison ivy. She was HIV negative. Her bloodtype was A positive, like me, and like me she lacked potassium. She’d had allergies, an ulcer, a lot of diarrhea, the flu every year, constant sore throats. She’d had both her tonsils and appendix out, two surgeries during which, I imagined, my father had visited her in the hospital. She was on the pill—Seasonale, the one that made you miss your periods. On her last visit, just six months before, she’d weighed 140 pounds. I even got to see another picture of her. It was one of those strange photos they used to take of newborns in the hospital, just her head floating on thick white cardstock, with piercing, wide-open eyes glaring at the annoying postnatal paparazzi. There was also a glossy hospital-issue piece of paper with the baby’s footprint in blue ink. It listed her date and time of birth, her pounds, ounces, inches, and mother’s name: Branch, Irmabelle.

  I thought about Irmabelle at the Pierre handing me the old-fashioned photo of my father and her, holding the baby in the white lace bunting. I had thought it was a prop, not my real-live sister.

  Our charts were at the same time so similar and so different. At the very back of mine, fastened flat to the folder with bending metal arms, was the medical report of my abortion.

  Sibling rivalry had already kicked in. I was jealous of my sister’s chart. The year she turned thirteen the worst thing that happened to her was my father proclaiming her to have “weak ankles” after she had a sprain. She succumbed to his physicals every six months, complete with weigh-in and bloodwork. Like a child’s height lovingly marked on a kitchen wall, he’d kept a careful record of her time line.

  With the exception of my new brain tumor and one or two bouts of bronchitis, my chart pretty much ended after the abortion.

  I returned her chart to the place next to mine and went home exhausted to Mrs. Williams’ house. We ate dinner together in the kitchen, silently, with me getting up every few minutes to look at Arthur Weeman’s darkened window.

  I thought of my sister’s tiny footprint and the dog running through the streets. And I had a strange sensation of mourning something and celebrating something at the same time, I just wasn’t sure what.

  I wanted Isaac. But I was too tired to call him and try to explain what had happened to me.

  In the morning, I saw Arthur Weeman wave at someone. I was standing at the window, watching Arthur Weeman standing in his green bathrobe and slippers, when I was suddenly startled to see him wave at someone.

  It happened so quickly that I thought I must have imagined it, but when I looked down into the playground, I saw a girl with long brown hair wave back and then go over to a group of whispering girls. The girl and her friends couldn’t have been older than thirteen because they were wearing the lower-school uniforms under their winter parkas. Once you got to the eighth grade at Gardener, you no longer had to wear a uniform. They were definitely thirteen, or almost thirteen.

  I watched the girls for a moment longer and when I looked back up at his window he was gone.

  A bell sounded, indicating recess was over, and the playground quickly emptied. I stood there, stunned, for at least an hour, unsure of what I had just seen. I had a terrible feeling, that I realized I’d had for a very long time, that right before my eyes, things were going on behind my back, and I wasn’t very happy about it.

  “Let me get one thing straight,” Isaac said. “I like blow jobs.”

  “Well that’s a problem because my throat chakra is constricted, ” I said.

  We were sitting at a tiny corner table at Pastis and I felt nervous because the writer Jon Kettler was sitting at the next table and he was so tall (and handsome) that our knees were almost touching. We knew each other because our books were always next to each other on bookstore shelves, a fact that made us both a little uncomfortable as if we had slept together or something, and whenever we ran into each other we always made some comment about it. I hoped he wasn’t listening.

  “How do you know your throat chakra is constricted?”

  “A psychic kinesthesiologist told me and she was right about a lot of things.”

  “Well, how can we unconstrict it?” he said.

  “I don’t know. I called a psychic priest in Florida and he tried to help me but I think it got constricted again.”

  “Here’s my phone,” Isaac said. “Call him again now.”

  “I’m supposed to send my picture to him before I call.”

  “We can take care of that,” Isaac said. He took his phone back and showed me photo after photo of me on his tiny cell phone screen. “How about one of these?”

  “I don’t think these would work,” I said. I was wearing my favorite dress, a low-cut Issey Miyake, and they were of just my cleavage.

  “I think they’re perfect. They’re of your throat. Isn’t that where your problem is?”

  “These pictures are not of my throat,” I said. “I work in a doctor’s office so I’m pretty sure my throat is not between my breasts.”

  “Well, there’s nothing wrong with your breast chakra,” Isaac said.

  Isaac’s cell phone rang and he looked at me.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “It’s Ivy.”

  The phone rang again. “Let me just talk to her for one minute.”

  “Isaac, this is a fancy restaurant,” I said, annoyed. “Can’t we have one meal without Ivy?”

  The phone stopped ringing. Isaac looked down at his phone as if he expected it to detonate.

  “There,” I said, “see. You didn’t answer and nothing happened. ”

  A moment later the waiter brought a black telephone to our table like in an old movie. “There is a call for Mr. Myman,” he said.

  “Who are you, Desi Arnaz at the Tropicana?” I asked.

  Isaac picked up the phone. “Hi, no, it’s fine.” He grabbed my hand across the table, as if that romantic gesture compensated for the fact that he was on the phone with Ivy, two steaks with béarnaise sauce between us, as big as her 34DD’s.

  I noticed a new gold wedding ring had popped up on Jon Kettler’s finger. Our books were always together neck and neck, and yet he had gotten ahead of me.

  “I’ll get you some good shots tonight,” Isaac said into the phone. “I promise.” I hated his voice just then. Very Willy Loman. “I have some great leads. I know I can practically guarantee you Courtney Love . . . What! How’d he get that? . . . With Angelina Jolie. Jesus . . . Sure, no problem, I’ll hold.”

  He took his hand from mine and covered the mouthpiece of the phone. “Sorry, I won’t be long. Ivy’s got nothing for the column and I have to come up with something by tomorrow. I’m in a little bit of a dry spell.”

  I thought of Arthur Weeman standing in his green bathrobe, waving to the girl in the schoolyard and the girl waving back. Thinking of the bathrobe made me almost want to cry. I’d thought I was the only one who got to see him in it.

  I noticed Jon Kettler talking to his friend about the teaching job he’d just taken. From what I could tell his friend worked in some kind of think tank in Washington. The restaurant was filled with men who probably had nice important jobs doing things other than skulking around New York trying to find Courtney Love. It almost made Derek Hassler’s job at Maxim magazine seem noble. I tried to think of men I admired. Arthur Weeman, greatest filmmaker of all time. Paul Revere, goldsmith by trade, but also a politician and revolutionary. Charles Ingalls, farme
r and homesteader who was also willing to work in a dangerous coal mine, in a mill, and in a noisy big-city hotel to take care of his family. David Letterman, talk-show host. Hugh Nickelby, novelist. Even my father was at least a doctor and a not a celebrity bloodsucking vampire.

  Apparently Ivy came back on the phone because Isaac jumped to attention like a newbie at Abu Ghraib. “Yes, I’m still here. Uh, sure, where are you? Where’s Guy-Antoine? . . . Oh . . .”

  After a few more minutes he finally hung up. “Ivy’s broken up with Guy-Antoine,” he said. “He met someone at Yaddo.”

  He said this as if I would actually care.

  “That’s nice,” I said, looking down at my steak.

  “I told her I’d go meet her for a drink. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Yes, I do,” I said.

  “I’m her friend, Rebekah. We can still finish dinner and then I’ll just go meet her in Brooklyn for a little while. I have to work tonight anyway.” I put my napkin on the table and pushed my plate away. “Why don’t you come with me? Ivy really likes you. It would really be great if you could be friends with her.”

  “Why don’t you go meet her right now,” I said. I told myself not to storm out. I was too old for that kind of thing. Jon Kettler was watching my every move. But I just couldn’t stand Ivy Vohl. And I knew myself well enough to know that if he said one more word about her, a wave of adrenaline would carry me out the door past all those better men.

  “Ivy told me she would love to go shopping with you sometime. ”

  “What does that mean, go shopping with me? That’s crazy. We’re not thirteen. What two women go shopping together?”

  “What’s the big deal? She told me she thinks you have a unique style. It’s a compliment. You’re not much of a team player, are you?”

  I quoted the famous Groucho Marx line: “I wouldn’t want to be on any team that would have Ivy Vohl as a member.”