Elegies for Uncanny Girls

by Jennifer Colville

  I say it louder. “I want to stop.”

  He stops, gets up from the bed, and walks into the other room. I wonder what he’s doing. I hear him peeing. I hear him running water. He comes back and I’m lying on my stomach and he lies on top of me and says, “I know you wanted to stop, but sometimes little boys …” He pushes inside again and I’m back down in the mattress. I try to think that it’s better face down—it eliminates any question of my performance. But mostly I don’t think, I hold on to the pillow and listen. I try to keep my head up because it’s hard to breathe.

  In the morning he looks embarrassed. He brings me dried figs and cheese arranged in a circle on a china plate. He wants to sit on the patio so we can look down on his landlord’s trees. I pick up a fig and examine it.

  “Why don’t you eat?” he asks. I’m thinking that it looks like a part of the male anatomy. He has half a fig in his mouth and he chews it very slowly. He watches me watching him and smiles.

  He’s careful with me, now that he’s reached closure. Now I’m something left over, a different person, probably a little dangerous. I’m like one of those strange out-of-the-blue images that are initially so exciting but must be eliminated when they begin to take on lives of their own. Or maybe kept on file. I wonder how many other girls he keeps on file. I push my chair out and walk to his room to get my things and to search for one last detail. There’s his already-made bed, with the covers smoothed over. There are six red flashes on his answering machine that weren’t there last night.

  We walk down a zigzagging path through the gardens. In one of the trees I think I see a flash of blue feathers, but it’s the underside of leaves in the wind. The trees are full and shimmering, and the leaves are big enough to wipe across a face. I walk ahead of him, decide I want one. I go down, and I’m about to pass in front of a window when he yells, “Stop,” and I stop the way he didn’t, the way he tells me to stop my stories, to go back, revise, to never get out of control. He runs down, saying, “I’ll get it.” When he comes back up he’s smiling. “Professor Pater lives there.” He knocks me in the arm with his elbow and covers his mouth as if to conceal an “oops.”

  The ride down the hill is too slow. He takes his time, leaning with the curves, whistling through his teeth at his movement. I fix on my token, my leaf with the turquoise-blue back, and let myself float into the realm of possibility. I imagine that the car has stopped, that he’s already kissed me and touched my hand conspiratorially, and that I’ll have stashed in my bag details for later use.

  I imagine how I’ll step out at the pet store, where we started with me pretending to stare into the aquarium of goldfish while he moved in behind. No, this time I’ll start without him. I’ll walk out of the pet store, past the coffee shop, and bakery. I’ll stop in front of the bungalow with the plastic pink flamingo, the unexotic, out-of-context, brilliant pink flamingo with the tiny wise eye. Forget the peacocks. I’ll start there.

  When Maggie Thinks of Matt

  When Maggie thinks of Matt she thinks of an Edward Weston photograph of a large plaster mug in the middle of a desert with the word coffee painted onto it as an enticement. She thinks of misplaced, mismatched old things, such as the mildewed movie house just up the street from her apartment in the neighborhood she didn’t know was dangerous, and of the movie star he said she could be. She thinks of the building facades in downtown Syracuse, gray and leaking soot, of the inside of the old opera house, opulent with decay. She thinks about his bad teeth and tiny handwriting—squared and old-fashioned like the keys on a typewriter. The woman with a baby on the porch next door, who looks at her so she can’t look back. She thinks of what she can’t remember—of petticoats, green silk undergarments, hospital sheets, carved mermaids shedding their scales, and overripe fruit. She thinks of her privileged longing for experience.

  It’s strange to her that she used to touch him. It makes her shiver to remember. Even then it made her buzz with a mixture of excitement and revolt. Yet it was she who called him up, because he was smart—really smart, she thought, and forty-five years old. She said, “Come over for dinner,” and he arrived with a bottle of wine and a smile that set all his wrinkles into high relief, made his face crack open with pleasure, made him look terrible, the way she looked as a small girl, smiling so hard her lips climbed up over her teeth so only her gums showed. She remembers thinking, oh no, he’s like me, and, this will never work.

  She remembers trying not to look at him during dinner. She’d forgotten his skin was crepe, his face not strong boned, and that his eyes were dull, with a brown ironlike spot, similar to the surface of an old toy where the white lacquer had been rubbed away. But he kept looking at her and catching her looks, crinkling up his face and smiling. His energy was so strong, she thinks, a little like a wound trying to heal; a desperate sucking, as if she were air and light. How could she resist being pulled into all that intensity?

  Still, it’s embarrassing to recall herself as the person who was flattered by his way of looking—the winks she mistook for wisdom but now understands as a simple recognition of her loneliness, and a romantic ploy. He had a way of looking that said, “We’re both sad souls alone in the universe”—which is exactly what she would have wanted him to see—her sadness that came in and out, that she thinks of now as a quirky gene, but once entertained as deep, once wanted someone to unearth, in order to show everyone how she might be a Sylvia Plath, or a young Virginia Woolf, under the youthful pleasure of her looks.

  But that was ten years ago.

  Last week an old friend told her that somewhere in that space, Matthew had been driving, he’d slipped off an icy road and died.

  So she remembers carefully, her boldness with him that first night, how she took him up to the attic because it was dusty and full of antiques and forbidden by her landlord, which made it more erotic than the candy-colored couch under the windowsill covered with bright glass bottles, where he would surely look too old and decayed. The attic contained the full-length mirror she’d once stripped in front of, which held her body in a flattering light, made her small breasts look bigger, her boy-frame yellow, buttery, and full.

  Climbing the attic stairs, she remembers becoming aware that having a man behind her could be sexy. She’d seen it in a movie, the slightly affected pivot of the hips, the surprise of being taken from behind.

  And as she climbed his wrinkledness vanished. He became a dark shadow, taller, until, in the attic, his shadow dropped. The attic was brighter than she’d remembered, lit up with fluorescent light. And he hesitated, turned stiff and self-protective.

  And this is where she fills in what she wants him to have been thinking.

  He might have been thinking that he was twenty years older, had two children, and liked to dress in women’s clothing for erotic pleasure. He might have been thinking about how this would be used as evidence against him by his ex-wife in an upcoming custody case. He was probably thinking that he loved his children, but had spent thirty years of his life keeping secrets and cultivating self-destructive behavior, and now that he was out in the open, falling apart, here was this girl-woman, bright—like Mary Tyler Moore, the can-do type, like all the girl-women he fell for and wanted to be. And this is when, she thinks, that laugh of deep pleasure and sadness bubbled up, as if he were saying, “Ah, I am finally at my most tragic.”

  And if it weren’t for his pause and the mystery of this laugh, she might not have put her hand on his chest and leaned into his jacket, into all his layers like dusty bird feathers, or old books at the Salvation Army. If he hadn’t hesitated and she hadn’t leaned in, she wouldn’t have taken on the form of a prepubescent girl from one of those books, with a large candy-apple face, and he might not have decided he would be romantic, different from the boys with the instant erections, like his son, those uncontrollable lightning-bolt erections that he wasn’t sure he could have anymore anyway. That were never the register of love. And yes, he would love her. He was the type to fall for faces, to k
eep his mind away from the responsibilities he didn’t plan on having, and the mistakes, oh, the big mistakes of his life. Yes, he’d show her something different. This girl with the changeable face, the seriousness and lightness, this constant shifting, like light on glass. He’d show her gentleness from a man; at least, that would be his intention.

  So he said, “Can I kiss you?”

  And she remembers that she didn’t like the taste of his lips, his tongue felt too thin, and his breath had the bitterness of a bad diet. It might have ended there. If she hadn’t caught sight of their figures in the full-length mirror, hadn’t seen the way his arm rested on her back, and the glow of her own skin, then the way his long coat enfolded her. The way he flipped his collar up like a vampire, or a detective—half comfort, half danger.

  When he caught her watching he turned her toward the mirror and said, “Look,” with sudden delight, talking to her as if she were his daughter, whom he saw only on holidays. He said, already with misplaced pride of ownership, “Don’t you look just like a picture.”

  * * *

  When Maggie thinks of Matthew she remembers driving through narrow streets, through sleet that shrouded the car so they could barely see out, and how the whole world was plastic upholstery, cigarette smoke, and melancholy pop like her own, but two decades older, so crackly and more romantic with feedback. She remembers how the smoke in the car was the only thing that made stepping out into the sleet refreshing, and how hard she’d worked to not be disappointed that Syracuse was actually pretty far from that other city in New York.

  She tried to compensate by exploring the insides of the old buildings like the opera house. The bank buildings from when the city was bustling and rich. She walked downtown, lifting her face to look at the grimaces of the gargoyles on the Catholic church. And now she’d tired of the effort and Matt was happy to drive her to strip malls instead. He had no artistic qualms about drinking coffee in brightly lit chain bookstores—even if these were stores that would never sell the kind of books he wanted to write.

  But they were not lovers—they just pretended to be. This was because, after only one date, Matt, realizing the full tragedy of his situation (breakup of a marriage, potential loss of a daughter, and full responsibility for a teenage son) could not help but read his poem, announcing to the world (that was really their small circle of acquaintances) that he used to borrow his sister’s skirts, and that his son had just come upon his secret—a box of mail-ordered women’s clothing, lipsticks, and perfumes.

  And although the poem was a hit with their peers, she was suspicious of the way he’d thrust a copy into her hand before the reading so she wouldn’t be “shocked” but could decide then and there if she ever wanted to see him again. She couldn’t help but find this crisis of their “love” presumptuous, and the catharsis of the reading itself a little self-indulgent. But despite her suspicion, and even though he publicly grabbed her arm after the reading, she liked it a little because some of the others—the ex–sex worker, the transgendered woman—suddenly looked at her with more respect. She liked it a little because the whole situation was so dramatic and unlike anything she thought she would experience.

  And she was lonely. She had acquaintances. But some of them let her know in subtle ways that she was too young, too midwestern, to be very interesting. In defense she’d tried wearing 1950s librarian glasses and combat boots to show she could at least be complicated. For Halloween she dressed to show she understood that beauty could be a trap. She was Marilyn Monroe with a pill stuck to her face and worse-than-usual bedhead. Or she plastered her hair to her head with a whole container of gel and was a drowned Natalie Wood.

  But then she had to wonder who she really was, now that she was invoking alienation. And her enactments of female victimhood were making her feel a little spooked, more fearful than usual of walking home through her neighborhood at night.

  She’d begun to look twice at shadows, to fumble her keys in locks, and to frequently feel that someone was following her. She hoped it was real, and that it was just Matthew. Matt knew her routine. He watched her enough to pass her a napkin at a party if she needed one, or to wink at her from across the room when she didn’t know who to talk to. Maybe, to take the edge off, she’d confront the seduction. She’d be a brave girl—she’d turn around and look him in the rusty eye.

  So she made a sort of compromise. She made a list of things they could do together and places they could go, and at these places they could talk about her screenplays, movies, or music, and she could grill him about his past life, his ex-wife, son and daughter, but he couldn’t ask her about her past life. He had to make guesses about her based on her behavior alone.

  As for places, they could go to the bakery bused by the mentally disabled and the bar on Queen Street he’d shown her, but only after 11:00 PM, and preferably on a rainy night because then it was like being inside a jeweled chamber, tucked into the first floor of a massive old building that had once been a grand hotel. Now the bar was the only part of the structure that felt alive; it was the overworked heart of the dying city, and here she was writing her film noir screenplay, for when she walked into the bar’s heat she felt the cold, and Death more acutely, pressing in on all sides, up against the deep red booths and windows that wrapped around, so they could look out to the street and see the neon beer signs light up the puddles—red, green, and blue.

  They had conversations that went something like this. He’d say, “What do you think makes a good pop song?” and she’d say, “Mystery, having enough open space in the lyrics so anybody can fill in their life.” And if she’d said that, he would probably have said, “I’m not good at open space. It makes me shake.” And she would say, “I know, you won’t leave me alone, you like things claustrophobic,” and he would say, “You are smart, aren’t you?”—eyes twinkling, slipping into seductive, because he knows she’ll say, “You mean you thought I was stupid,” after which he will laugh, “Ha,” in that staccato way, finger on a typewriter key, because he likes to set her off, and then say something like, “You should have been around for punk,” or “You should have seen this or that.”

  And she will think he’s patronizing, she’ll think it’s a double standard that older men can fall for younger women but not vice versa, and she will not want to change the subject from her smartness, but she’ll be curious about how she could be punk. He’ll tilt his head back, smoking now, satisfied to have her attention—he’ll be lost in interior monologue, like a slowly chugging engine.

  She’ll have read more of his poetry by then, his words like little pieces of metal, like braces, or outmoded machine parts. Sometimes like charms. She’ll be getting impatient for him to say something insightful, to look deep, to figure her out. And then he’ll say, “You could have been punk because you’d look good in tight pants.”

  And she will think this goes too far.

  She’ll think she has liked him not for his body. In fact, she has liked him despite it. She tells him, “Don’t say that,” because his body frightens her. She doesn’t really trust his so-called desire because he likes her for who he says she’s like—Mary Tyler Moore or a neurotic Doris Day. And sometimes she thinks it’s a vampire desire—she thinks he wants to steal her body and put it on. But he changes the subject because a song by the Byrds, or, no, the Turtles, is on the jukebox and they’re drinking and their moods are always quick to change.

  He says, “No, I take it back. You’re a jangle-pop kind of girl.” And she says, “What’s that?” always with a tone of suspicion when she doesn’t know something. He says, “California pop, sunshine, but with a melancholy underneath like Mama Cass. Dream a little dream, that aching thing, you know, like Marian the Librarian, ah man, singing to the stars.” And her breath catches in her throat because she knows that song—“Goodnight, my someone, goodnight, my love.” He says, “The sadder but wiser girl for me,” smiling like crazy because he’s on a roll. And suddenly she asks, “What do you think it takes to fall
in love?” She’s worried that this hasn’t happened to her yet. He looks and sees she wants to answer, and leans back to listen. She says, “I don’t think it’s possible. I think we always put ourselves onto the other person, our own idea of them. We smother them with ourselves before we can get to know them.” He says, “Man, you’re tough,” which she likes. Then he shifts in his seat, his arms stretch out along the vinyl booth, a cigarette makes his hand graceful. He says, “Love is looking carefully enough at someone to see what they want you to see.” And she thinks, oh yes, and he’s got her there, again.

  But he was not so smooth and confident all the time. He called her three or four times a day to say that if they couldn’t truly be together he would stop calling. He called her to say he couldn’t be with someone who didn’t know herself—who was so confused—then he called her back and apologized. He’d explain how his shrink said she’d probably given him something, or he wouldn’t have wasted his time. He said his shrink didn’t think he was as self-destructive as he liked to think he was, and now, in order to prove this to himself, he was ready to let her go, so “Goodbye,” he said, and she’d wait on the line and he would wait, and then partly to tease him, and partly because she was jealous of how often he talked about his shrink, she might have said something like, “OK, and I’m sure this is easier now that you’re in love with your shrink too.” And at this, he would have either laughed and agreed, or, if drinking, become angry and yelled. One night he did yell. In public—reaching across the table full of people and pulling her up by her arm. Then she knew it was over, for a few days, a week, maybe it was a month, or, anyway, until she got hit by the car.