Lullaby for the Rain Girl

by Christopher Conlon

  I rolled to her side again and lay there trying to calm my breathing, which had become ragged, uneven. I was shaking. Glancing over at Rachel I saw that she was, too.

  We lay there a long time, on top of the sheets, both of us on our backs, close but not quite touching. Our shivering subsided.

  Finally light began to redden the bedroom window. I could hardly believe that it had been twenty-four hours since I’d been sitting on the beach, staring at the surf—it felt like centuries. But at the same time it felt like seconds.

  At some point as the room grew lighter our hands brushed each other. One finger hooked with another. Then two. Finally, loosely, our hands slipped together. I listened to her breathing, calm now. After a while we raised our clasped hands together and studied them. Like everything about her, Rachel’s hand was small, much smaller than Sherry’s. I felt I could crush it in my own if I wished; but I didn’t wish. I felt suddenly protective of her, wanting to shield her from any more harm. I squeezed her hand gently. She squeezed back. Finally we moved together: our hands traced each other slowly, delicately. The early morning breeze touched us through the open window. She sighed. I sighed. We investigated each other’s bodies, our fingers moving as explorers’ on a map, seeking. Her strong shoulders, her little breasts, her belly, her hips, her thighs, her feet. Her hair. Her back and bottom.

  The room was bright when we moved into each other again. It was quieter this time, gentler. We embraced tightly. We still made no eye contact. But I watched as Rachel squinched her eyes shut, her face screwed up in what some might have taken for anger, and at last she bared her teeth and grunted twice, three times, and let out a long sigh, the tension in her face dissolving to something like peace. Her eyes opened then and she looked at me for the first time, her expression soft and stupefied, like a child waking from an exceptionally deep sleep, uncertain of where she is or how she got there. She touched my face and then wrapped her arms around me. I finished then, so intensely that it was almost painful. I heard myself cry out.

  We gazed at each other in the summer morning’s light. Finally, for the first time—the last step of this long night of the soul—we kissed. We kissed for a long while. At some point I realized that Rachel was weeping softly. I was too. We kissed each other’s tears and fell asleep in each other’s arms.

  # # #

  Later, in the evening, I toasted some frozen waffles in the kitchen and brought them into the bedroom for us to share. We sat cross-legged on the bed, naked, facing each other.

  “Thanks,” she said, a forkful of waffle in her mouth. “And thanks for the sandwich, too. Before.”

  I smiled a little. “We haven’t got much else left in the house.”

  “Mm. We can go shopping.”

  “Do you have any money?”

  “Some. I’ve got a hundred dollars in the bank. What about you?”

  “A few hundred. We won’t starve tomorrow. But we can’t afford to stay here for long.”

  “No, I know.”

  “If we give notice, though, we’d have a month. The last month was paid ahead.”

  “Let’s do that, then. That should be enough time.”

  “Yes.”

  We ate. I had a surprisingly big appetite; I wound up heading into the kitchen again and scrounging around for something. I found some hard red apples that had been on the floor earlier, but didn’t seem too damaged. I brought them in. We reclined on the bed together, shoulders touching, fingers entwined, munching away.

  “These taste really good,” she said.

  “They do, don’t they?”

  “The waffles, too. Just great.”

  “I think so too.” There was something about the moment, the room, the atmosphere that made our humble repast seem far more than it really was. It wasn’t just a meal. It was the beginning of a future. We both sensed it. Our heads touched, softly; she took some of my hair in her hand.

  “You need a haircut, hippie boy,” she said.

  I chuckled. “Come on, Rachel,” I said. The name “Rachel” felt strange in my mouth, though I’d said it many times before. But I’d not said it to her, the Rachel I knew now, my bedmate, my lover. I’d said it to a roommate. It was a completely different sensation.

  “Well, you do. You know, that stuff was tickling my face when we were doing it.”

  “Well, be that as it may...”

  She grinned and kissed me on the jaw. “What do you want me to call you? I can’t call you ‘Ben.’ Everybody calls you Ben.”

  “Well, there’s Benjamin.”

  “Benjamin. Benjamin and me.” She thought about it. “How about Benji?”

  “That’s the name of that dog in the movies.”

  “I know. You’ve got enough hair. It’s appropriate.”

  “Ha ha.”

  I reached over and tickled her belly. She shrieked and kicked like a child, her legs swinging wildly in the air. She pushed at my arms.

  “Stop,” she cried, twisting and writhing, “or I’ll do something bad!”

  “Like what?”

  Grinning, she grabbed me by the balls and squeezed—not enough to really hurt, but enough for me to feel it.

  “Ow! Hey! Okay, I give!” I held my hands back.

  “You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “You really sure?” She squeezed a bit harder.

  “Yes! Yes!”

  “Okay, then.” She let go and patted them softly. “Don’t make me get rough with your guys. I like your guys.”

  “They like you too.”

  “I noticed. Well, I’ll think about it, Benjamin. Hm...Benjamin and me. Benja-me. Benja-me-me.” She grinned. “Sounds good. You and me together.”

  “Well, it’s better than ‘hippie-boy.’”

  “Ha.” She nestled her face against my chest. “Benja-me-me it is, then. I’ve christened you. You’re officially mine. And don’t you forget it.”

  # # #

  Of course it was ridiculous. Of course it was too fast. Of course we were both in shock, grabbing at the nearest life raft that presented itself. But that only made it more intense. Everything I’d previously disliked about Rachel Blackburn suddenly became attractive, crazily so: her body, so unkempt and dirty and wild; her raunchy smell, part sweat, part cigarette smoke, part—at least in bed—vagina. Even her pinched little face, dark-featured and snub-nosed, almost pig-like, became something I wanted to touch and kiss and stroke forever. She seemed to feel the same about me. Like most young lovers, we found ourselves with a decided reluctance to put on our clothes. We slept together, showered together, made love—though “made love” is a feeble expression for the ferocity of what we engaged in. Not once in those first twenty-four hours did we so much as mention Sherry or Peter’s names. Though in real time they’d only just left us, by the time kept in my heart, they seemed fast-fading figures of another age. Rachel was my reality now, my present, my future. There was nothing else.

  We quickly discovered a sexual compatibility that was astounding—so much so that I found myself wondering why I’d stayed so long with Sherry O’Shea, who now seemed slow, sluggish, timid, though as a partner she’d always been quite enough for me before. But Rachel was fast, hard, brutal. She grabbed and pulled and scratched. It was simply different with her. Sherry and I had made love; Rachel and I, for want of a more elegant word, fucked. I would be left with bruises, abrasions. Her thighs would be chafed. It didn’t matter. That was part of us, part of us together. It might have been frightening if it hadn’t been so completely joyous.

  By the time we emerged from the apartment for the first time together, the first time as a couple, freshly washed and sexually satiated, it would have been obvious to anyone that we were young lovers; we walked hand-in-hand, swinging our arms childishly, breaking from each other and running, tackling each other and tumbling onto grass, kissing and nuzzling and tickling. The Rachel I saw now seemed a completely different person from the sullen, alienated girl who’d been my roommate, Peter’s
girlfriend; this girl was loose, silly, happy, pure pleasure to be with. Her gap-toothed smile, once glimpsed so rarely, radiated from her face now. She would grab my arm, pull me to her, kiss me on the neck and jaw and cheek. I found myself laughing, laughing as I could hardly ever remember laughing in my life. Our first outing, to the grocery store, was an occasion of wild shrieks and giggles, stupid kid jokes that were for some reason hilarious to us, as when she shoved two big grapefruit into her shirt and asked, grinning: “Better?”

  “Worse, worse!” I cried, grabbing at her chest, dislodging the grapefruit and causing them to tumble down her shirt and onto the shop’s floor. I chased one as it rolled down the aisle, Rachel’s laughter following me. People stared at us. I threw the grapefruit into our shopping basket, figuring that if we at least bought them, no one could complain.

  We brought the food home and put it away, started kissing each other and thus inaugurated another quick sexual session, this one on the sofa. We pulled ourselves together again after that and went out once more, first to give notice to Mr. Bogg, then to simply wander in the summer sunshine. Our mood was quieter now—the frantic hysterics of the morning had abated—and we strolled slowly, easily, completely comfortable with each other, at ease in the world.

  Part of me understood how strange this was. I didn’t like thinking of it, but couldn’t help it: Sherry and Peter had left all of two days before. Rachel and I had both been cruelly betrayed and abandoned. Yet it hardly seemed to matter now. The more I thought about it the more I realized that Sherry’s and my relationship had been at its end anyway: knowing each other since childhood, a couple since middle school, we had simply arrived at the time to move on. We’d grown and changed. It wasn’t possible to continue as we’d been.

  But as we made our way along State Street—utterly without destination—I felt something else, too. For a while now I’d had an odd, fated feeling about Rachel Blackburn—ever since I’d read her poems, really, and seen her as something besides a fairly brainless little punk chick. We were both writers, after all. And certainly after our acid trip it had felt as if we shared something private, something secret—a thing shockingly intimate. The fact that we were both victims of Sherry and Peter’s behavior only tightened the bond. There was a sense in me that Rachel and I had been moving inexorably toward each other for a long time—even, perhaps, that if Sherry and Peter hadn’t betrayed us, we might eventually have betrayed them.

  We wandered through a record shop, where Rachel complained that they didn’t have “shit for music here” (“Where’s Black Flag? D.O.A.? The Big Boys?”), and a bookstore, where she pulled down a volume of Sylvia Plath and had me read “Daddy,” my first encounter with that apocalyptic fever dream of a poem. “You do not do, you do not do / Anymore, black shoe...”

  “My dad was a good guy,” she said thoughtfully, replacing the book on the shelf, “but I’ve known a few Nazis in my time.”

  We had a snack at a little café next to the Arlington Theater—cheesecake and iced tea—and then found our way to Anacapa Street and the county courthouse, with its wide lawn and lovely gardens.

  “Remember this place?” she asked, grinning.

  I laughed. “What do you think?”

  “I think,” she said, in her best stoner voice, “that the hippie boy was trippin’, man!”

  I growled and grabbed playfully at her; she slapped at my hands, laughing.

  “Hey,” she said, looking up, “you ever been up in that clock tower?”

  “The El Mirador,” I said, following her gaze. “Yeah. It’s a nice view.”

  “I’ve never been up there. Let’s go up. Is it free?”

  “It’s free. You just walk up there, or take the elevator. Nobody stops you.”

  We took the elevator and stepped out, the vast, misty vista of Santa Barbara everywhere around and below us.

  “Cool!” she cried. “You can see everything!”

  We sauntered around, looking first toward the ocean, then the mountains, spotting familiar buildings—even our own apartment. Rachel was exhilarated.

  “Makes me think I can fly, being up here!” She stood at the railing, arms outstretched, gazing down at the traffic on Anacapa Street.

  “Look on my works, ye mighty,” she called out laughingly, “and despair!”

  “Despair!” I concurred loudly.

  “Despair!”

  # # #

  “Like I said, the High Plains,” she told me later, on the lawn of the courthouse, as we sat together sharing a can of Coke. “I was an only child. Mom drank. Dad didn’t know what to do with her. He was strong in every way except dealing with her. I don’t have good memories of my mom, Benja-me-me. She was an angry drunk. She passed out at the kitchen table some nights. I remember covering her with a blanket sometimes, putting it over her shoulders, and just leaving her there. This would be late, after Dad was in bed. Dad was a farmer, or he tried to be. But the land there is terrible. He could never really make a living at it. Wheat, cotton. And sunflowers—there were lots of sunflowers in the summer. I loved those. But it was a raggedy-ass place. The house was old, things were always falling apart. My dad did what he could but at some point it all got away from him. When my mom died he just seemed to lose energy. He started falling apart just like the house and the farm. He was always thin; he grew thinner. Smoked all the time. He tried, but...

  “Living in that area—it was like a ghost town. There was one school, for all grades—Harman Combined School. It wasn’t literally a one-room schoolhouse, but Jesus, it was close. But there were hardly any kids, that’s why it was ‘combined.’ Families had been leaving there for the past fifty years. They’re still leaving now. There were five other kids in my kindergarten class. I graduated high school with three. The town was dying—it’s still dying, shit, if it’s not already dead. Downtown Harman had a library—that was important to me—a grocery store, a bank, a hardware store...what else? A real estate office. Three bars. It was just this dead little burg in the middle of hundreds of miles of wheat fields and buffalo grass. Our house was way out of town—it took an hour to get there on my bike.

  “I read a lot. Mystery stories. Fantasy. Anything. That’s when I got interested in poetry. I remember there was a book at the library I checked out over and over again, called The Pocket Book of Story Poems. A little paperback. I read it over and over again. Ogden Nash and Poe and A.E. Housman and all those guys. Poems that told stories, you know? Perfect for me, at that age. I needed stories. I needed poems. I needed to be away from that place, even when I was there.

  “Music helped me. You couldn’t buy a record in Harman, so I joined record clubs. You know, pay one dollar now and get twelve records and you have to buy ten more over two years or something? I got the Sex Pistols delivered right to the front door, which was cool.” She grinned. “Dad made me get headphones.”

  “That I can picture,” I said, taking the Coke from her. “But I can’t picture you as a country girl.”

  “I was, though. Plaid shirts and boots and everything. But it’s not like people imagine the country—horses and ranch hands. It was just us, with the seasonal help that Dad would hire. See, you just think I’m some Valley Girl or something...”

  “Rachel, I did not say...”

  “But look.” She flexed her right arm. “Go ahead. Feel.” I did: the muscle was big for someone her size, stone-solid. “I’ll have you know that I can run a fuckin’ John Deere tractor. Have you ever run a tractor, hippie boy?”

  “Can’t say as I have.”

  “Well, there you go. I have all sorts of talents that you know nothing about.”

  “I’ve read your poetry,” I said, “and I’ve had sex with you. What other talents matter?”

  “Ha!” She took the can back. “I had to leave, though. I knew it long before Dad got sick. But shit, everybody leaves Harman. The population has dropped every year for the past fifty years. Back in the twenties it was thousands. It was like a hundred when I left.”


  “When was that?”

  “Almost—hm. Three years ago.”

  “After your dad died?”

  “Yeah. Everything was sold off. I got a little money from a life insurance policy—that’s what I’ve been living on. But that’s it. Like I told you, it all went for debts.” She stared at the grass. “Poor Dad. He tried. He really did. But nobody can make it out there, not really. The place broke him. It breaks everybody. It would have broken me, if I’d stayed there.” She reached into her back pocket then, bringing out a little black wallet. She took out two tattered snapshots and, looking at them for a moment, handed them over to me.

  As unlikely as it seemed, the photos made it clear that Rachel was telling the truth. The first was of a thin, reedy man, middle-aged, in a worn blue farmer’s shirt and black baseball cap. His skin was dark and hard-looking, deeply creased, clearly the skin of a man who had spent much of his life in the sun. He was squinting self-consciously at the camera and displaying an uneven grin. I noticed that he had the same gap between his two front teeth as Rachel. Brown wheat fields were blurrily in the background.

  “Dad,” she said. “I love that picture of him.”

  “He looks,” I said honestly, “like a nice guy.”

  “He was. Hated having his picture taken, though.”

  “Yes. You can see that.”

  The other photo was of Rachel herself, smiling in a plaid flannel shirt, old blue jeans, and scuffed brown boots, her hands on her hips before a decrepit-looking old house. The same brown fields were in the background. Her outfit was incongruous enough, but her long, straight farmer-girl hair and utter lack of any piercings on her ears or eyebrows or nose made her almost unrecognizable.

  “I was fifteen,” she said. “That was just around the time that punk started turning me into a bad girl.” She grinned.