by Alix Ohlin
One day her mother had found her asleep on the couch. A button on her shirt gaped open, exposing her midriff, and her mother thought she saw a rash there. Bending closer to inspect it, she saw that it was an intricate maze of cuts, each line crossing the next, forming a mass that looked like a star.
Hence, therapy.
Annie’s after-school hours passed in appointments: the dentist, the hairdresser, the dermatologist. She was being raised and tended by a corps of professionals, to which Grace was only the latest addition. Thus far, she didn’t think they had made much headway. The girl was polite, did as she was asked, and answered questions at a reasonable length, all while giving away as little as possible. Her parents believed her when she said she wasn’t cutting anymore. Grace didn’t.
But today was different. She came in wearing a fleece zip-up over her uniform, with her long hair swept up in a messy ponytail. Usually she sat staring at the ground with her legs crossed as Grace prodded her to get the conversation rolling. This time, though, she held the homework assignment out right away.
Taking it, Grace said, “Why don’t you tell me, in your own words, what it says?”
Annie shook her head. “Please don’t make me,” she said. “Look, I did it. You can read it, okay?”
“This wasn’t really for me. It was for you. To get you thinking when you’re on your own, and to give us a basis for our discussion here.”
Annie didn’t say anything, just looked at her with her enormous eyes. Her face had a coltish, unfinished look, a softness in her features, as if her bones hadn’t quite finished forming. Her hands played nervously with the pleats of her navy-blue kilt. Her fingernails were long and perfectly manicured; it was something she and her mother did together. As Grace watched, Annie lifted her hand and squeezed a pimple on her chin, tried to stop, then pressed it again, the look on her face pleading.
Grace waited her out for a minute, hoping she’d give in, but finally relented. “All right,” she said. “I’ll read it out loud—”
“No!” Annie said. “Please.”
“Okay. I’ll read it to myself, and then we’ll talk about it. You have to promise that we’ll be able to discuss it together, all right? Is that a deal?”
The girl nodded and looked down at the floor. Finally, Grace looked down at the page. The letter was extremely short, the handwriting strangely androgynous: slanted, angular, not the usual bubbled teenage-girl script.
A Letter to Myself Now From Myself
When I Am 24, by Annie Hardwick
Im sorry I couldn’t focus on this assignment.
I think Im pregnant.
Grace looked up. The girl was crying, her head turned toward the corner of the room as if this made her invisible. She sniffled.
Grace held out a box of tissues. “Here, blow.” Then she said, “Do your parents know?”
Annie shook her head.
“Have you taken a pregnancy test?”
She nodded.
“How late are you? When was your last period?”
“I should have gotten it almost a month ago,” the girl burst out. “You have to help me.”
“Of course I’ll help you,” Grace said calmly. Instantly Annie’s face brightened, only to dim again when she added, “I’ll help you tell your parents.”
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Annie said. She’d never sworn in session before. She’d stopped crying now, and her face was red and swollen. “My mom threw a fit this morning because I have a hangnail. ‘Annie, there’s no point in me buying you a twenty-dollar manicure if you can’t keep it neat for more than a day. Why are you so careless?’ What do you think she’d say if she found out I had a fetus inside me? How careless is that?”
Careless was the last thing Annie was. She was weighted with care, which was rounding her shoulders and curving her spine; it was crushing her.
“I think she’d be glad, in the end, that you could confide in her,” Grace said, though truthfully, Annie’s characterization of her mother seemed accurate. The girl might have been high-strung and deluded about her own failings, but she had a pretty good grasp of her parents’.
“You’re crazy,” Annie said, the tears falling again, “if you think she wants to hear about this.”
“What about your father?”
This question made Annie cry even harder. “Oh, God,” she said.
As bad as Grace felt for her, her pulse was quickening. This was the first time Annie had reached out to ask for help, or ask for anything at all. It was a major crisis that could push her over the edge, but, properly handled, it could also bring her back.
Grace let her cry for a moment, her shoulder shuddering with sobs before finally slowing. Annie blew her nose loudly once, twice, then sat fidgeting with the tissue in her lap. After a while, Grace said, “Tell me about the boy.”
The girl shook her head.
“He’s part of this too, you know,” Grace went on. She needed Annie to say if she knew him well or just a little, whether she loved him, anything that might lead to a real discussion.
But Annie only shook her head again and smiled wryly. “He’s nobody,” she said, her tone weary, suddenly wise. She was a chameleon: in her school uniform, crying and begging for help, she’d seemed a child; now, crossing her legs and smiling mysteriously, she could have been five years older. Grace could feel her receding, the mask of her face closing. So for the next few minutes she gave a rote explanation of the options, of Annie’s future, urging her to seriously consider all the possibilities, to talk to her doctor, to think, and to remember that no matter what happened, her life would not be over.
Annie nodded, acting as though she were listening, but when Grace paused, she said, “I can’t trust the doctor. She’s friends with my mom and I know she’d tell her even if she promised she wouldn’t. I can’t trust my friends, they’re such total gossips I know they’d have to tell somebody and soon it’ll be all over school. You’re the only person I can tell.”
“I’m glad you feel you can talk to me.”
The girl saw an advantage and pressed it, leaning forward and locking her wide eyes on Grace’s—the same posture she probably used at home when asking for some special present. “Will you promise not to tell my parents?”
Grace sat back. For the second time in as many days she felt herself being enlisted in a pretense, a story in which she ought to play no part. And again she felt that same need to take a risk, to earn the trust of someone in need, because nobody else in the world seemed to have it. But this was a child. “I can’t do that,” she told her.
“I should’ve known,” Annie said. “This is such a waste of time.” She stood up and stuffed her things into her bag, the zipper of her fleece singing as she pulled it up.
“Wait,” Grace said, wanting to give the girl something to carry with her out of the office. “Just remember that you have options.”
When Annie turned, her face was as blank as snow; anything she’d just revealed of herself was now hidden behind a gate of disbelief. Only the tinges of pink at her eyes and nose hinted at the explosions of the past hour. “Sure,” she said, “options.”
Grace had the sharp, sudden feeling that the girl would never come back again, or share anything of herself if she did. This wasn’t the first time that she’d seen a teenage girl in trouble, but Annie had gotten under her skin—her quicksilver changes between adult and child, how hard she came down on herself, the shy glitter of her braces-thick smile. Grace wished it were permissible to tell her the simple truth: that the same thing had happened to her in high school, and that while she would never wish it on anyone else, everything had turned out fine. This was hardly appropriate therapeutic practice, and she never once had been tempted to confess it before. Something about Annie was different from other patients, and it made her want to prick the bubble of the girl’s unhappiness. And the way she talked about the baby’s father, her air of shielding secrecy, had touched Grace’s heart, and her memory.
She bit her lip. “Okay, Annie,” she said, “I won’t tell.”
When she closed the office at five thirty and stepped outside, it was her own life, not Annie’s, that she was thinking of. Back in high school, she had been a champion downhill skier, gifted on the slopes. She had spent her weekends drowsing on overheated buses to and from Blue Mountain. Her parents’ house had a wall filled with her trophies and medals and blurry photographs showing her swooping across the finish line in an aerodynamic crouch. There had been talk of recruitment, of Olympic possibilities. Her coach said he’d never seen a skier so confident, so fearless. Her connection to the sport was part instinct and part habit: she skied because she always had and because her body knew how to do it without being instructed. Even the muscle aches that sometimes woke her up at night felt like part of her, as natural as breathing. Then, the year of her sixteenth birthday, her boyfriend Kevin blew out his knee on a sharp turn in a semifinal heat.
Kevin’s was the first body Grace knew as well as her own. Sinewy, olive hued, it had revealed itself to hers in the backs of buses, cars, a room at their friend Cheri’s house during a parents-out-of-town party. His chest was almost hairless, his muscular calves ropy with veins. The fact that she at first had been frightened by its contours and smells, its unexpected explosions of hair, its capacity for sexual performance, made her eventual familiarity with it seem all the more important, more earned. Seeing him in the hospital bed with his right side bandaged and cast in plaster, she felt the throb and pulse of pain in her own body.
Two weeks after his accident, Grace said she just didn’t feel like skiing anymore, that she was quitting. This was understood as an act of dramatic renunciation by her teammates, parents, and coaches. Taking it as a testament of her great love, Kevin burst into tears, though this might have had something to do with all the drugs he was on. Her parents encouraged her to confront her fears and get back on the horse. Grace explained calmly and maturely that she had simply decided it wasn’t worth it, that there were other things in life she wanted to pursue. But she was lying. The truth was that just before Kevin’s accident she had discovered she was pregnant. She knew exactly what to do, and she shot toward it as if on skis: she had an abortion. She didn’t tell Kevin, or her parents, or her friends. It was all very straightforward.
Afterward, to her surprise, she in fact didn’t feel like skiing, and Kevin’s accident provided the perfect cover story. Originally she’d thought she might take a couple of days to recover, as if from a flu, and then, to the rousing cheers of her parents and teammates, return to the sport. But she soon discovered that the urge to race, to compete, to win, had been bled from her on the same morning. It had all been too ridiculously and awfully easy. She had a baby inside her, just like that, and she got rid of it, also just like that. Two equally momentous, symmetrical events.
Not one soul knew what she’d done, and the air of corrupt superiority this secret engendered in her changed her more than either the accidental pregnancy or its termination had. She told herself that she ought to give up something she loved—skiing—in reparation for her carelessness and ruthlessness. But even this sacrifice proved easy and false. Once she quit skiing, she was surprised to discover how little she missed it.
Kevin endured months of rehab and within a year was back on the team. Grace had no idea what had become of him, this boy whose body had once been so familiar, whose child she’d had inside her. During his recuperation she’d tended his skin with vitamin E lotion to minimize the scars. She’d thought about the thin, olive-skinned children they’d have someday, when they were ready, when it was time. As his knee healed, they swore they’d always be together. Yet when she got into U of T, she accepted without even really discussing it with him, knowing he’d already started eyeing a girl on the swim team with chlorine-bleached hair. Life carried them so fast down the slope and far away from where they’d started that they hardly noticed it happening. They broke the promises they’d made to each other so quickly and easily that they didn’t even have time to feel betrayed.
TWO
New York, 2002
SHE WAS NEW to the city at a time when having been there before meant something. She was late to the event. She didn’t know anyone, hadn’t lost anyone, wasn’t part of the history. This was all okay with her.
It was January. She found an apartment on the Lower East Side through a guy she met in her acting class. Larry’s grandmother had lived in the apartment for decades, keeping the rent low; now she was in a nursing home, adrift in an Alzheimer’s haze, only occasionally convinced she would soon move back home. The family, having cleared the apartment of its doilied furniture and ancient knickknacks, sublet it to Anne at what even she, new to New York, could tell was an insane bargain. This was because Larry hoped to have sex with her. She took the apartment and dropped the class.
Sometimes he came by, supposedly to pick up his grandmother’s mail or check on the faucets. “I never see you anymore,” he’d say, barely dampening the complaint in his voice.
“I’m so busy,” she’d say, never specifying at what.
Larry worked in commercials. He was the husband strolling through the house in the real-estate ad, the man grimacing with hemorrhoid pain before exhaling in relief. In between these shoots he took classes and auditioned for plays. “Keeping busy’s important,” he told Anne. “An unstructured life is a terrible thing.”
She politely agreed, then left as soon as possible, abandoning him in her apartment. She knew he wouldn’t disturb anything or rifle through her things—he was a transparently honest person, which was one reason he wasn’t a very successful actor—and also that he wouldn’t find anything of interest if he did.
She was not, in fact, busy at all. If her life was unstructured, at least it was terrible in ways she enjoyed. She had saved enough money to tide her over while she looked for work, and she believed that something perfect would come along—without knowing what it might be—and that before it did she shouldn’t accept substitutes. Her confidence in the universe’s generosity was mystical, and no less strong for not having been confirmed. She spent her days in coffee shops on Houston Street, reading Stanislavsky and scanning ads for casting calls. People at auditions kept shaking their heads and saying, “This part isn’t right for you, but trust me, it’s only a matter of time,” and she believed them. She heard the phrase so often that she came to see a matter of time as a literal, physical thing she could wrap around herself like a blanket, comforting and soft.
Finally she took a job at a temp agency in Midtown, mostly because she thought waitressing was a cliché. She did data entry in the off-hours, leaving the days free for auditions. In the waiting areas she always saw the same people, who became the closest thing to friends she had, although she knew they really weren’t, that they would resent anyone who broke through. She was cast as a fairy in a Midsummer that, being post 9/11, obliged her to wear a turban and carry a hand grenade. Even though the production was awful, she felt the lights on her face and knew the audience in the darkness was watching her, and her blood boiled like a kettle, dying to be poured.
The play closed after ten days, and her nights were free. Larry had stopped coming around. One evening she saw him inside a bar on Avenue A, holding hands with a woman across a tiny table, his eyes glassy with triumph. She didn’t care about him, of course, but a physical ache rippled across her skin. She went to a poetry reading that night at the New School. The reader was middle-aged and Irish, with ghostly, blue-green eyes. Each poem concerned the dissolution of his marriage and his resulting loss of faith in the world, which he thought had already been lost. This was the worst part, his poems seemed to say: you believed your cynicism would save you from hurt, only to discover a secret, uncherished vulnerability in your soul. Anne sat in the front row, bought his book afterward, and told him that his work spoke to her as little else did. “You’ve made me feel less alone,” she said.
They went out for a drink. The poet was rambling
, sweet, and tender, and wept while describing his mother, who had died when he was a child. He didn’t ask Anne any questions about her life, but she didn’t mind. Acting was about listening, one of her teachers had told her: you focused on the other person in the scene and let them dictate to you. You reacted. Even more than that, you let them change you. So there was no need to decide in advance how to say your line. It was all response. This is what she did that night; by listening, she became—or pretended to become—the only woman in the world who understood him. Two days’ growth of salt-and-pepper beard grazed her cheek when they kissed; on his breath was the sour smell of red wine. At her apartment, he lay in bed and ranted about the man who was fucking his wife. The next morning he apologized if he’d talked too much.
“Not at all,” she said. “It was exactly what I needed.” What she needed was the bruise and crash of another body against her own, a collision that made her feel real. She’d wanted to be manhandled, not listened to, or cared for, or even seen.
“You pretty women are such goddamn nightmares,” a drunk told her one night in a dim bar on Fiftieth Street, where she’d stopped by after a day of temping. She had let him buy her a drink, then turned him down for dinner because she didn’t like the smell of his cologne, and now he was mad. “You’re all the same. Hollow at the core.”
“I’m not hollow,” she said, smiling sweetly. Her core was molten, radioactive. She knew that beneath the surface she was diseased, rotten, incinerating herself from the inside. But that wasn’t the same thing as being hollow. Not the same thing at all.
Toward the end of February, she got back to her building around six in the afternoon. She had been cast, through the intervention of the Irish poet, in a play about the potato famine. In rehearsals she had to roll around moaning in hunger in a chilly basement, and after every session she was exhausted and aching and, indeed, starving.