Once, in Lourdes

by Sharon Solwitz

  Two weeks ago Garth came back from Florida, where he’d lived in a van, he said, with a twenty-year-old woman and her pet tarantula. In the Everglades. He returned suddenly old and wise, older than her in some ways, knowing, among other things, a great deal about recreational drugs. Garth, her baby brother. He came back for her, he said. To be with her.

  Weak in the back of her knees, still she moves townward, impelled by the left-right-left of her hands and feet, wet wind at her back. Near the lake are multistoried houses with screened back porches, cupolas with views of water, railinged widow’s walks. Inland, the houses grow smaller and closer together. They become cabins or trailer hookups housing summer people, who rent for a week or a month and leave sunglasses behind, and damp paperbacks. Dogs yap. A girl in a bathing suit spins on a tiny lawn, arms out, head back. A man calls from a doorway, Kim? Lynn? The girl keeps spinning.

  On the next, apparently untenanted block, Vera stops and puts her feet in ballet first position. She bends her knees, straightens, and rises onto her toes, plié. Relevé, feeling again the strength and pliancy of her spine, la sagesse du corps, as Madame Jarkov said of her body, which, for seven years in a row knew all the movements of ballet even as they were demonstrated, as if she weren’t being taught but simply reminded. Madame Jarkov had singled her out for praise: Elle flotte, n’est-ce pas? And now she is floating again, over to the Red Owl for a pack of Camels, maybe a carton.

  On Main Street, the two blocks of shops that constitute downtown Lourdes, the pierced lobe of one ear calls attention to itself. It’s not pain; she rarely feels physical pain. Out of curiosity, primarily, she stops in front of the Coast-to-Coast and looks at the reflection of her ear and its heavy earring, a present from Kay. Oh, Kay. Behind the glass a fly settles on the chrome handle of a riding lawnmower. Then the fly is gone, only to reappear on the machine’s grass-green seat, and Vera is off again to the beat of her earlobe, stepping high over the neatly tarred cracks in the rain-wet sidewalk. Someone overtakes her, a youngish woman, walking fast with lots of butt swoosh in white-stitched Kmart jeans that show the hip-hugger line of her underpants. Vera pities the woman, at the sad, inevitable point where looks don’t matter anymore.

  The acid is coming on now. To steady herself, Vera stops at a pet shop featuring a large aquarium. Fish dart through greenish water in which her face glimmers. Pretty? Ugly? She pushes her hair back from her ear; the lobe seems to breathe. A fish with brilliant blue stripes flits into and past the reflection of her neck, leaving a bright blue afterimage. Her earlobe swells, subsides, like an aquatic plant.

  By the time she reaches the Red Owl the rain has stopped. Two men pass toting six-packs, bellies bobbing. A woman pushes an empty stroller, followed by a child of three or four, who every once in a while throws a stone at her leg. Tragically patient, the woman plods on. The child is lumpy, tuberous. It may be bad, this trip. Why don’t people stand up straight? Her earlobe feels hot. A repeating sound issues from it, like a tapping foot. It’s not especially annoying, but suddenly her hand has risen to her earring. Good hand steadying her bad one, she pinches off the metal back. And they are gone, the earring and what secured it.

  She’s on her knees but has already forgotten what she is seeking. Everything, lost in the soft green moss in the cracks of the sidewalk. There are jewel-like iridescent chips in the pebbled cement. An ancient penny throbs green and dark gold. But she is happy. Beyond happy. The sun has struck the angle where it turns the world golden, the hour of kindness and peace and ego-rest before it goes down. On the damp, cool sidewalk outside the Red Owl her body and mind open like a baby’s, like yesterday. Between beauty and ugliness, holiness and sin, there is only language, word-sounds turned into music in the incredible golden light. She could write a book, Joy and Madness, describing the miraculous truth that if you just stand still and look, everything in the world, good and evil, will flicker by like television. The End of Ugliness? She smiles at her shadow on the pavement, neither pretty nor ugly, eternally beyond comment.

  “Hey, blondie, what’d you lose? A diamond or something?”

  A boy maybe a little older than her, in mirrored sunglasses and an armless sweatshirt that reads BUD KING OF BEERS, has just exited the Red Owl. A cigarette sticks out of his fat Mick Jagger lips. He stops dead in front of where she’s kneeling, a full shopping bag in the casual bend of his arm as if he’s used to carrying much heavier things. Tall, with an oblong face, he is juicily arm-muscled, the kind of guy imitated by younger, weaker guys. The hand at the end of his muscled arm pats the top of her head. “Say, Marilyn. Is that hair for real?”

  She stands up, trying to reknit the frayed ends of her social self. “Va-t’en,” she says crisply, French for “Get the fuck out of here.” From his sunglasses to his loose lips over his long chin, this is not someone she wants to know. He has probably driven up from Hammond or South Chicago with a bunch of loser friends to play loud music at the campground and eat potato chips and leave cans of beer inside the fire ring. She is attracted, though, to his Red Owl shopping bag, over the top of which, behind some hot dog buns, she has glimpsed the corner of a carton of Camels. She’d walk a mile for a Camel. She has walked a mile.

  “Hey, sexy lady! What did you lose, honey, one a them contact lenses?”

  The question intrigues her, in particular the word “lose.” “Lose face” comes to mind, though without an accompanying image. More important are the cigarettes, though she can’t think about them without thinking of the camel-hair coat she used to wear to church. In her closet there’s a camel blazer for college interviews, a birthday gift from her Texas grandmother, though she herself has no college plans. That’s what she has lost, her college plans. She giggles, puts her hand to her mouth.

  “Hey, beauty. Let me in on the joke.”

  She avoids his sunglasses, which present two distinct, warped pictures of her face. Below his shirt the narrow bands of his golden-brown abdomen taper into his unbelted jeans. Her hips jerk involuntarily. With her good hand she reaches out and touches his skin. It’s softer than she expected.

  “Do that again, baby,” he says. His torso is washboard-hard. He holds her life in his hands. “You’re really out of it, aren’t you?”

  His face is suddenly, obtusely sure of itself. She’s at the point in her voyage when images assault. Oh, for the sweet rush of a cigarette. Her good hand presses her weak one to her stomach. Give me please one of your smokes. Would you kiss my chest right here in the middle between my breasts? Would you hold me hard and not let go no matter what?

  She’s trapped between the camel-bronze of his skin and the camel-colored camel on his carton of Camels when a second young man arrives. He has thick-lashed blue eyes, but he’s short, with the stiff, self-conscious walk of the sidekick, the pale, diluted version. He pulls a stick of beef jerky out of his friend’s bag and bites off the top. “Nice, amigo. She got a little girlfriend?”

  Mick Jagger Lips looks her over again, his regard for her restored, perhaps, by that of his friend. “Sweetheart, you want to party tonight?”

  His top lip rises to let the words out. In the twin lenses of his sunglasses is her forehead times two, swollen in the curve of glass. Her face deformed. In French, she knows, “face” is “le visage.” Or “la figure.” Once her mother said—a real live compliment!—You have a nice figure. But it’s a lie; she is disfigured. May I have a cigarette? The words resound in her mind. Or did she say them aloud? His gaze is cool and warm at the same time down her face, neck, shoulders, chest. Her belly squeezes with nausea and excitement. Would you like to fuck me? She reaches for the cigarette carton.

  “What’s that?” His eyes lock on her bad hand on the carton it has made the mistake of touching. Fearful, ashamed of itself, the hand tries to hide inside its fist, then retreats to her midriff, which offers no protection. The boy speaks through closed lips. “What’s with the hand, babe? Are you one of them mutant—” He turns to his friend. “What’s the thing those prego chicks
took? Thalo something?”

  Coolly, unreflectingly, as if it has performed the feat many times, her good hand reaches up, grabs the front of his shirt, and turns him to the storefront window. Her voice too has refound its strength. “Look, moron! Someone should punch your chin back into your head! Do you think there’s a girl in the state of Michigan who’d pull down her pants for you? Why don’t you and Brother Dickhead hippety-hop over to your little Ford pickup and head back to the trailer park?” She flees, ballet-graceful, though her shoulder bag thumps against her side.

  She’s at the curb waiting for the light, about to cross the highway toward Fast Food Row, when she is grabbed by the hair. The flat of a hand slaps her face. Whap, whap, gonna teach you a lesson. In her head there’s an annoyingly bright light, but her body is oddly tranquil. “Go right ahead,” she says to the hand hitting at her. “Do you think I feel anything?” She thinks she is speaking. There’s a buzz in her larynx.

  Now she’s sprawled across the curb with a woman striding toward her. “Are you okay?” The woman kneels, trying to see her face. “Beasts!”

  “Thugs. Punks,” says a man. “Let them beat on each other, but a girl? You didn’t see that ten years ago.”

  “Her nose is bleeding. Pinch it, honey. In the middle, like this. Mannie, do you have a hankie? My God, that eye. Should we call an ambulance? Or the police, maybe?”

  They argue about whether to help her stand or make her lie down flat. Vera enjoys their ministering, their concerned, middle-aged expressions. They’re her aunt and uncle, they’re the grandparents she used to dream about, her mother’s parents from Finland, who died before she was born. Then the word “police” accosts her ears. She’s out of their helpful arms, running as fast as she can, across Lake Street to where Main becomes U.S. 12, heading north to Canada and south around Lake Michigan to Chicago.

  —

  Hamburger Heaven is the first restaurant in the chain of franchises on U.S. 12. Vera gets in the longest line with the hope of postponing a decision. Soon, though, she’s at the white-tiled counter, face-to-face with a woman her mother’s age, who is smiling with routine, weary friendliness. “If you’re still deciding, young lady, would you mind stepping aside? Maybe you want to use the washroom?”

  Vera steps back, bumps a little girl holding a woman’s hand. The woman has a small upturned nose with gaping nostrils. Vera must elude their beckoning darkness. The woman pulls the child closer, but the child eyes Vera with solemn interest. It’s hard to bear even the child’s scrutiny. Sweat runs down her sides in individual drops.

  Then the tray arrives, mother and child move off. The counterwoman says, “So, young lady, have you got it figured out?”

  Vera looks around frantically. Faces are opaque, bodies block the door. Overhead is a picture of an enormous hamburger, striations of cheese, patty, onion, bacon, lettuce, tomato, and creamy sauce.

  THE ARCHANGEL $1.95

  No words come to mind to reaffirm her right to take up space on earth and in this restaurant.

  “Miss?”

  All she can do is point, but it’s enough. “She wants an Archie,” the woman calls, happy with her. A nice woman. “And to drink?”

  Now it’s easier. “Coke?” says Vera.

  “Pepsi okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “For here or to go?”

  “Here?”

  “Deluxe?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s a wait on the fries, I hope you don’t mind?”

  “Yes! I mean no!”

  The woman smiles forgiveness. “Now you better take care of that eye.”

  The transaction concluded, Vera is free to look around. By the door is a cigarette machine, in front of which stands a college-age couple. The girl buys a pack of Kools. When she pulls one out, her boyfriend strikes a match, cupping his hand over the flame with a tenderness that moves through Vera’s chest.

  She wafts toward them and toward the white and green pack in the girl’s hand. Vera doesn’t like Kools, they’re too minty-sweet, but nearing the girl she inhales from the bottom of her belly and takes in what’s supposed to be bad for her. At age five she loved so-called bad smells: gasoline, her father’s sweat; they aroused a bodily shiver. Bad smells and touches. At three, in the back of the family car next to Garth in his kiddie seat, she stuck one of her polyp fingers into his sweet open mouth, and he sucked, and she shivered from her knees to the small of her back, a feeling so bad and so good she wanted to have it always and at the same time wipe it off the plate of her mind right into the garbage.

  Now, cresting on acid, she breathes harsh, exhilarating hand-me-down smoke. And she’s three years old again, beside little Garth in the back of the car. But now, age three, looking into his gray toddler eyes the same color as hers, she sees his thinking, so much like her thinking. She sees in his rapidly organizing brain that some bit of this experience will remain, accruing mass and odor like a rind under the fridge. And this time she puts a pacifier in his mouth, a rubber and plastic nipple shape that she can easily let go of, and not her nub of a finger, which goes into not his mouth but a little hole in the plastic seat of her mother’s car. And she feels no nausea, sweet or otherwise. And for the next ten or twelve years, nothing burns in either of their guts. Yesterday didn’t happen, could not have happened—amazing, this acid vision that contains truth. Time is malleable like modeling clay. Why, she can back up more than her sixteen-plus years, crawl up the birth canal, and fix the gene in the chromosome that screwed up her hand. So that here at the white-tiled counter, when her hands emerge at last from her pockets, either one can reach into her shoulder bag, unzip the wallet, and pull out a bill for the counterwoman, and it will make no difference which hand does what, since both are, at last, identically graceful and strong.

  “Order up.”

  “Un moment, s’il vous plaît.” She pats her shoulder for the strap of her bag. She pats her hip.

  “Miss?” The woman sets the drink on the tray beside the Archangel and the steaming fries. Hanging from Vera’s shoulder is exactly nothing. Vera looks at her hands and finds them empty. Where else?

  “Young lady? Yoo-hoo!”

  Vera calls back, high, thin, adrift, “I know. Sorry. I can’t find my…” watching the tail end of her explanation blossom into the word “hand,” which is not what she meant to say. And she’s out the door.

  At first she knows where she’s going; she can see the spot on the sidewalk where she dropped her bag. After ten steps, however, the mental image is gone. She circles the building that is Hamburger Heaven, white-painted brick shining under the parking lot lamps. Around back, past the trash cans, is a line of cars, head to tail, their windows open. Involuntarily she peers into one.

  “Hello?” someone says.

  “Who’s that, Todd?”

  “Beats me.”

  She moves up the line from car to car, eyeing faces, though for what purpose she doesn’t know. At the front of the line is a car with an Illinois license plate, a convertible with two girls inside. Out of the drive-through window comes a large, freckled hand, closed competently upon the rolled top of a white paper bag. The bag changes hands, paper money changes hands, the car moves on. She steps up to the window and peers in, following the white-sleeved arm to a face she knows. Saint. St. John.

  The car behind her blinks its lights; she pays no attention. A few days after Garth disappeared, Saint came to her house by himself, supposedly to talk, to calm her down about Garth, but he had nothing to say. It was almost a relief when her father came home and ordered him gone. Saint can be maximally annoying, especially his habit of blanking out for whatever reason. But now his presence soothes and almost pleases her, his hair netted back, his forehead high and shining like a priest’s. She opens her mouth, hoping that what comes out will make sense.

  The car honks; she gives it the finger and turns back to Saint. “I lost my bag, but it’s cool. I lost my brother, but I don’t know. I thought I found my hand,
but I can’t even find my handbag. Do I sound crazy?” Words pour like water. Her body is water lapping around his familiar form, just beyond the parallelogram of light from the window. “I was lost but now I’m found, apparently?”

  “Are you stoned, Vee?”

  She giggles, then reaches in to touch him. Behind her the car flashes its brights again and again.

  “Could you come back at ten-thirty, Vera? With the rest of the pack? It’s a zoo now, right?”

  Ten-thirty was when they were meeting. The cohort, as usual. But it’s more than she can handle right now. “I want just you.”

  He looks consternated, even annoyed with her.

  “Call them,” she says. “Please,” says Vera, who never says please. “Tell them we’ll see them tomorrow.” Heat and light are radiating from the skin of his arms and face, and she imagines his tongue in her mouth, and now she is trembling. “And then buy me some cigarettes? Please, thank you, I love you.”

  3

  Casa Campion

  Through most of high school I did my best to avoid members of my immediate family. When they were home I’d don my cloak of invisibility at the door and waft up to my room, where I had supplies in the form of cookies and chips. My aim was a life apart, which I achieved—and was permitted—except for our so-called family dinners, from which I could neither excuse myself nor emerge from without a sense of my unworthiness to breathe the air of the nicely decorated room.