Look at You Now

by Liz Pryor

  “Daniel … He has a really great family,” I said. “He likes to ski, he played football in high school, and he loves music.” It felt impossible to describe who Dan was, and how well we got along. Ms. Graham probably thought I was some kind of have-sex-with-anyone slut girl. I wanted to tell her I wasn’t. I wanted to tell her I regretted it, that I wished Daniel and I had talked about having sex. Had we planned some special time for it, maybe all this wouldn’t have happened. But it wasn’t like that, we didn’t have sex routinely, and we didn’t talk about it. Daniel hadn’t asked me about my period, or the sex, or my body changing. We were clueless and stupid. I’d gone over it a thousand times in my head since that day in my dad’s wife’s doctor’s office, when I heard the ocean-rolling heartbeat. My regret was enormous.

  “Do you have any thoughts about what kind of people you’d like to adopt the baby?” Ms. Graham asked.

  I had no idea what to say. “I guess I’d like them to be … nice.” That was a stupid thing to say. I looked down at the floor and watched as it slowly blurred from my tears. I’d cried more in a couple weeks than I had in my entire lifetime.

  “I am sorry, Liz, I know this is a lot for you.”

  “Whatever.”

  “No, not whatever, this is obviously upsetting. And I want to help if I can.” But she couldn’t—no one could. I wished I could put a roadblock up at the front entrance of my mind to stop all the new things coming in that were too hard. That I didn’t want to know. Ms. Graham handed me the box of tissues.

  “We can take this slowly, Liz, over the weeks. There’s no reason you have to think about the adoptive parents right this second, all right?” There was a light knock at the door. I turned to see the guard, Chief, peeking her head in.

  “Oh, sorry, didn’t know you had a visitor.” She looked over at me and smiled her nice smile. “Hey, girl, you all right? Ms. Graham treatin’ you good?”

  I looked down at my lap and squeezed out a “Yes.” Ms. Graham stepped out of the room with Chief. I was frozen, my brain was screaming stop. It didn’t want to think about dead babies or kids living on the streets with no one to care about them, or strangers taking home the baby in my stomach. I asked God or anything that might be listening to help me find a way to be brave. I closed my eyes and asked the tears to stop—I promised them I’d think about the bad stuff another time. I noticed the back of a picture frame sitting on Ms. Graham’s desk. I turned it around to see a picture of a young girl with a man in a park. I sensed it wasn’t a happy picture. I turned it back around and noticed a book sitting next to it. The jacket read Sophie’s Choice, in black script writing. I’d seen this book before, at home in my mom’s room, or maybe in her car.

  “That’s a great story,” Ms. Graham said as she walked back in the room. “Would you like to borrow the book?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Do you like to read?”

  “Yes.” I shifted my aching body in the chair. I was constantly surprised by the size of my stomach and how it weighed on my back and legs. Then I remembered to ask her, “Why don’t they have any books up at school?”

  “Well, the facility doesn’t have the money to put into the school, so we have to make do. Maryann works for little money, and some of the staff are kind enough to bring supplies and things from home.” I wondered why they called it a school at all. Why didn’t they just say the girls are going up the hill to nap in a cold room? How in the world my mom got the high school to accept “credits” transferring from that room was impossible to imagine. Ms. Graham was writing something down. She looked up and asked, “How is school?”

  “It’s pretty terrible. I mean, no offense, but it’s not school, or anything even like school. Some of the girls don’t know how to read. Did you know that? And most of them sleep the whole time we’re there because we do nothing for hours.”

  “The school could use improvements, and, yes, I am aware there are a few girls under the literacy line.” I looked at the diplomas in their shiny frames hanging on the wall behind Ms. Graham and then glanced over at her bookshelf. The girls really didn’t like Ms. Graham. Maybe their worlds were just too far apart. Ms. Graham was an educated, reserved lady. To me, she seemed a person who wanted to do her job well and help the girls with their lives. But she couldn’t seem to get that across in a way that worked. As I thought about it I realized adults are sort of the natural enemy for teenagers anyway, and Ms. Graham was an adult in a position of authority, which was even worse. And then I decided that Ms. Graham for sure didn’t have children. She just didn’t have that soft/hard I-have-kids-I-have-to-be-both thing about her.

  “Is there a public library anywhere around here?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course there is, why?”

  “I don’t know. You could check out books the girls would like, and that way they’d have something to read, or at least something to try to read. No one would have to pay for it.”

  She looked at me a long moment. “People have to want to learn, Liz.”

  “I think they want to learn.”

  “Maryann would disagree.”

  “They ask me to read to them. Nellie is smart. She knows a lot of things but I’m pretty sure she can’t read.”

  “Many of these girls have not been to school regularly. And they aren’t interested in learning. Nellie has yet to pass a literacy test. But the purpose of this facility is to offer a safe, comfortable setting for the girls as they wait to give birth. We can’t take on their education. We’re just not set up for that.”

  I was confused about everything. I thought I knew so much before all of this started.

  “Some of the girls’ lives here are unimaginable,” Ms. Graham was saying. “I know it is very sad and, honestly, it must be very difficult for you, coming from where you do. But please remember that for some of them, most of them actually, this is a nice place to live. They are happy to be here.” She’d said that before. And maybe it was true, but it didn’t feel like an answer.

  “I was just thinking if Nellie can’t read, she could learn. She has nothing else to do,” I said.

  “You surprise me, Liz.” Ms. Graham smiled.

  “I don’t mean to.”

  “I know you don’t. I will see what I can do about getting more supplies to the school. And, Liz, I spoke to your mom today.”

  “What? Why?”

  “She called to say she wants to come Thursday and keep you out overnight, which is fine. She’ll be here when you get out of school that day.”

  “That’s great, thank you,” I said. My heart leaped… . Thank you, God!

  “You miss home?”

  “Yes.”

  “And there are seven children in your family, your mother was telling me?”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s a lot of children. Your mom took care of all the kids herself?”

  “Yes. Well no, when we were little, we had a woman, an au pair, who lived with us and helped her.” I thought back on those years with a new feeling of nostalgia. I was about eight years old when our au pair came to live with us. It felt like forever ago—that life was so unburdened, so simple and steadfast. Our dad took a trip to England in the summer in search of a person to help our mom with the house and the chaos of seven children. He came back with Helen. We stood, all of us wide-eyed, in the front entrance of our house, staring at her. She was tall and pretty, with long, light orange hair. She was an unusual combination of gentle and strong at the same time. Dorothy called Helen a saint, Lee deemed her competent, and we all adored her, especially me. Helen had grown up in Scotland and spoke with a thick accent that made us laugh.

  My parents gave Helen every other Saturday off. The very first Saturday she was with us, she asked if I’d like to come downtown on the train with her to explore the city. I was so excited I could barely speak. I put on my patent leather party shoes, pulled my fancy coat out from the back of the closet, with the matching beret, and ran downstairs. Helen asked my mom if I coul
d join her for the day and when Dorothy looked up from the newspaper, she was visibly aghast, “For Goooooooooooood SAKES, Helen, why on earth would you want to bring an eight-year-old with you? Liz, let Helen go have fun with people of her own age, for crying out loud.”

  In the thick accent, Helen gently responded, “Oh, Mrs. Pryor, I very much would like to bring her. I would be grateful for her company.” Imagine that, Helen wanted me to come. I put the knit beret on my head, smiled a sassy smile at my mom, and we set off for the Winnetka train station. Dorothy shouted as we left, “You’re out of your mind, Helen!” The beautiful North Shore suburbs zoomed by as the train headed to downtown Chicago. There was a large crew of young sailors wearing crisp white sailor suits and hats in our train car. Several of them whistled loudly as Helen and I walked by. I looked over and one of them smiled at me.

  “Why are they whistling, Helen?” I asked.

  “Sailors whistle like that when they see beautiful little girls,” she said. And I believed her. I looked down at my white tights and party shoes, smoothed my coat, and smiled to myself. We spent dozens of Saturdays together over the next few years, exploring different parts of the city around my home, places I didn’t even know existed. Helen slowly took over a small corner of my heart that I knew would remain a part of me forever. I wondered what she’d think of me now.

  • • • •

  I jolted back to the present, in Ms. Graham’s office.

  “Large families are fascinating to me,” she was saying. “I am an only child.”

  What? That was the first human-person thing I’d ever heard her say. I couldn’t imagine Ms. Graham as a kid. She was one of those adults who had completely shed every trace of being young from every part of who she was.

  “I bet you got to spend a lot of time with your mom,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you didn’t have to share your mom with brothers and sisters. You got her all to yourself.”

  “I suppose you’re right. I never thought of that.” Something swooped over her face just for a moment—and then it was gone. I suddenly wanted to know more about Ms. Graham. Why did she wear such sad-looking suits every day? Why did the girls really dislike her so much? And why did she smile so rarely? I’d only seen two half smiles and maybe one full one in all the time I’d spent with her.

  • • • •

  It was killer, bitter, burning cold when I went outside after my session. The ground was still snowy from the blizzard a few days before. The wind was crushing. I could barely see a foot in front of me, but strangely, I liked the feeling. Only the cold could make everything disappear from my head, all the fears and worries. I walked and walked until my nose and fingers were numb. I’d taken a shower late that morning, and my hair hadn’t completely dried. I could feel it freezing up into clumps, like it did once on a family ski trip to Colorado. I slowly made my way back around the building and toward the entranceway. I hadn’t lasted very long. I leaned my whole body on the red button, hoping Chief would be right there to buzz me in, and she was. There was a loud suctioning sound when the air met the cold and then the door slammed hard behind me.

  Chief was sitting in her usual spot at the desk behind the fence, glued to a soap opera playing on the small-screen TV.

  “I told you, crazy girl, it’s a cold one out there.”

  “Yeah, it’s so cold it hurts.” I leaned against the fence between us and shook the snow off my coat and shoes. My hair had clumped into frozen heavy chunks.

  “Ever seen icicle hair, Chief?”

  She looked carefully at my frozen hair. “I never seen that before, must be a white girl thing.”

  “I don’t know. I think it’s a go-out-in-the-cold-with-wet-hair thing.” She was about to say something but then she put her hand flat up against the fence and shushed me. She reached over and turned up the TV, scooched her chair closer, and leaned in about five inches from the blaring screen. She loved her soap opera. When a commercial finally came on, she turned around toward me.

  “Chrrriiiisssstttt Almighty, Luke just might cheat on Laura. You know Laura, these two been meant for each other since the beginning of time. She loves him. He’s her man. But she’s been gone now for a long time. Her nosy bitch aunt made her leave Port Charles, trying to keep them apart, kill their love, you believe that? But real love is too strong, yes it is. Luke is dying inside, thinks she doesn’t care anymore, but she does. And now the nasty slut neighbor woman is goin’ after him.” Chief talked about them like real people she knew. The show came back on. The beautiful young woman on the tiny screen made her moves on the guy.

  “Maybe he’ll say no to the neighbor, Chief,” I said.

  “He’s a man, Liz, and that neighbor-skank knows her business.” She was shaking her head and twisting her hands, worried and nervous.

  “Well, I’ll see ya, Chief. You’ll tell me what happens tomorrow.”

  I headed down the hallway and a few seconds later heard her scream, “Don’t do it, Luke!”

  • • • •

  Time felt like something different to me. I could actually feel the dragging of every minute, almost every second. Life had stopped all sense of moving from point A to point B. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to be. All there was to do was wait. My mom used to say being bored was a sign of low intelligence. Clearly I had very low intelligence. I was bored beyond reason. Bored out of my mind. And flabbergasted that the other girls weren’t more bored. A day felt like two days, or even three. Five months would no doubt feel like three years. The slow passing of time was becoming the hardest part of all. That day I tried to nap some of the time away, but Tilly barreled into my room. Amy and Nellie trailed behind her.

  “What the hell, where you been?” Tilly said.

  “I went for a walk.”

  “Must be nice to come and go as you please,” Tilly said. Amy picked up my guitar. Nellie poked her finger into one of my wet ringlets of hair and said, “There’s a new girl in the lounge… . She’s taking Elaine’s spot. Amy has to room with her.”

  “Poor Elaine,” Tilly said. “I can’t stop thinking about her baby.” They all went quiet for a second.

  Nellie turned to me. “Liz, did you go to see graham cracker lady?”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “Why the fuck do you even go there?”

  “’Cause, I don’t know, I kind of like her.”

  “You like people asking all about your shit?”

  “Sometimes.” They were all looking at me, so I changed the subject. “Does someone come get the laundry at some point? All my clothes are dirty.”

  Nellie burst out laughing so hard she had to sit down.

  “What?” I said.

  Nellie imitated me. “‘Does anyone come and get the laundry?’ Like fucking who? Cinderella?”

  “Well, I don’t know, how do our clothes get cleaned?”

  “We clean ’em, dumbass, we put them in this thing called a washing machine and then in this other thing called a fucking dryer.”

  “Very funny, I know what a washing machine is.”

  “But you never actually used one!”

  “Well, no,” I admitted. Tilly offered to show me how. I started to gather my dirty clothes. Tilly took the sheets off my bed and systematically stuffed them into the pillowcase. She knew what she was doing. She threw the case over her shoulder, Santa Claus–style. I took change from the cup on the dresser—Tilly told me to—and I followed her out of the room. Nellie and Amy straggled behind. In the lounge, we saw the new girl. She was short and really pregnant, with big dark round eyes. She kind of looked like a creepy porcelain doll. Nellie slowed down and pointed to the new girl, saying, “That’s Gina.”

  Tilly waved, and I said hi. Gina looked up and gave an uninterested nod, like a guy would give. We headed down to the basement and into a room with a few machines, a couple of folding chairs, and a table. Tilly took the coins out of my pocket and bought soap from a funky machine on the wall. S
he told me to separate the light clothes from the dark.

  “Why?”

  “’Cause you can’t do them together.”

  “Right. Why?”

  “’Cause your dark clothes’ll run all over your light clothes and ruin them.”

  Nellie nodded. “She’s a professional, listen to her.”

  I separated the clothes and then loaded the washers. Tilly showed me which dials to turn and then closed the lids. “That’s it?” I asked.

  “Yeah, now we wait.”

  Nellie stood up and circled the small room. “Attention people, Liz P. is doing her laundry. Yep, Liz P., from no one fucking knows where, is cleaning her goddamn clothes.” She had her hands cupped around her mouth. They laughed, and I rolled my eyes. Amy and Nellie eventually went next door to the cafeteria for dinner, and Tilly and I sat down in the folding chairs, waiting for the load of laundry to finish.

  “So, where are you from?” Tilly said. “I mean I know it’s all secret and stuff, but I won’t tell anyone. I swear to God I won’t.”

  “Who told you I was hiding here?”

  “Well, no one exactly. I mean Amy overheard Alice talking to graham cracker before you came, and then … well, they knew we knew, so they told us.”

  “Told you what?”

  “They said you would be coming to live here because you didn’t want anyone to know where you were. And that we weren’t to ask you any questions about yourself. It was Nellie who figured out the rich girl part. So are you from somewhere like California?”