Exes

by Max Winter

  *Former Fox parent Phyllis Deinhardt. Mother of future Eagle Square project manager (see note below, viz. “. . . mill building”) Jacob Deinhardt, an ex-student against whom Eli held not even the slightest grudge, and whom, in fact, he kind of liked in spite of Jake’s having also had a thing for teacher’s erstwhile heavy pet, Alix. In the end, it was Mrs. Deinhardt’s cherished fieldstone hearth that kept Eli from plowing straight through that wrong house, down the hill, over one of our smallest and least photogenic national parks, and into the Moshassuck River.

  Ike Hafkin . . . his kid [sic]: Yours truly. “What? So you’re a bum too, now?” said Grandpa Ike, getting his lawyer on the horn.

  . . . the idea to live in a mill building: On August 1, 1993, eight RISD undergrads and one local high school dropout (the same Cliff Hinson Rob refers to here) decided, after only a week or two of seemingly idle talk, to rent for a mere $950 a month the entire third floor of One Eagle Square,* a pre–Civil War textile factory located in the formerly industrial Olneyville section of Providence. Others—including Rob and Viv—soon joined them, renting subdivided spaces on the two floors above.

  *The building had been zoned commercial/light-industrial—past tenants included sweatshops, records management firms, fire- and water-damaged office retailers, and, in the case of the first two floors of One Eagle Square, an indoor flea market—but in the beginning no one paid its new inhabitants any mind, mostly because of Olneyville itself: a Superfund site tucked into what was then an all-but-forgotten river valley on the west side of Providence. Back then, Olneyville was one square mile of mostly empty mills, underused off-ramps and railroad tracks, cold-storage facilities, lumberyards, pawnshops, and crammed tenements. Up until the real estate boom of the late ’90s, what few on-duty cops drove by Eagle Square paid more attention to that Dunkin’ Donuts on the corner than to all the loud music and unkempt art punks hanging out in the flea market parking lot.

  . . . a local nuthouse: Butler Hospital. Though I can’t speak for Rob’s glazier friend, my own stay at Butler was brief but refreshing, thanks in large part to the lush, rolling lawns; mature elms, pin oaks, and tulip trees; and soothing views of both the Seekonk River and Swan Point Cemetery. One morning I fed a lost fawn saved-up Craisins® through the bars of my bedroom window. Her dirty little lips tickled my fingertips, and I laughed like a child. After this book is done, I may well check myself back in. So many old faces. It would be reunion of sorts.

  . . . a girl named Viv who wasn’t a junkie yet: Alix’s former Fox classmate Vivian Goddard (see also “Exes,” “Class History,” “Neoteny”).

  Teach: Rob was my brother’s last—and maybe best—student. I’m sure they made the most of the prison library’s meager offerings. So little fiction . . .

  Juárez: Whether this happened or is just something Eli made up or stole from a dynamiter’s memoir almost doesn’t matter. Or, should I say, doesn’t mean it isn’t revealing. Over the years, my brother had to tell a lot of stories and make up a lot of characters—heroes and villains alike—just to get by. And although I can’t see him in Mexico, that likely has more to do with the failure of my imagination than the wildness of his. And hell, either way, he probably believed it.

  She was tall and blond . . . : You know, this sounds an awful lot like my sis, right down to the big nude boobs and the backpack of swill and the corny moon tattoo . . . I will stick to my earlier promise to leave her out of this, but I imagine many kid brothers go to some lengths to steal glimpses of their naked big sisters. And what’s a little poison ivy? The sun and surf took its toll, of course—these coastal outdoors can be cruel to exteriors—but back in the day, she was something else. Even the negative spaces she made when silhouetted by the sun were hot.

  Exes

  Alix Mays

  I GOT HOME FROM WORK—BREAKFAST SHIFT, BACK-TO-BACK Expository classes—to find a former student spread-eagled on the kitchen table.

  “Hi dear,” my mom mumbled through her paintbrush. She took it out of her jaw and stuck it into a blob of pink. “Come on in,” she said, like there were way more than one of me and some of us weren’t paying attention.

  Fuck, I thought, plopping my things on the foldout Rob had liked to fuck on. It had been three weeks since I gave him the boot and two since my mom showed up, announcing that she needed a place to live and that she was painting vaginas. “I’m painting vaginas now,” she said. “Fine,” I said. But presently I must’ve sighed, because my mom—who I call Kit—shot me a look through her glasses, which, because they’re thick and dark, is a look you only feel. I felt it.

  “Hey Professor Mays!” my ex-student said, smiling. Kim? Too close to Kit, but stories where names can’t get crossed are like sitcoms where no one says goodbye before they hang up. Kim wore a T-shirt, and her vulva was pointed at us. I could see why she might want to show it off. Instead, I looked at the canvas, where Kit had painted a hoofprint on a birthday cake. At least she put towels down.

  “Alix, honey,” I said, pushing Kit’s wine-stained teacup away from the edge of the coffee table with my foot. “It’s always been Alix.”

  “Alix.” She laughed. “Your mom’s an amazing artist!”

  Kit frowned, knifed on some mauve, and tried to look at Kim over her glasses.

  “Kit is . . .” I said, and went into my bedroom to grade essays. I sat on the bed, next to the Rob-shaped dent, and put the stack on my lap, but I couldn’t grip a pen without fire up to my elbow. I threw the stack onto the floor, asked myself how old I was. Out on the fire escape I rubbed my bad hand with my okay one.

  I still tell myself Rob had only been crashing, this latest time. That he just needed a place to call home because of the eviction. We’d broken up then, too. But this time was for good, and I meant it. He wore me out. I didn’t even want to think about him anymore. “That’s enough now,” I told him, like I would in French—ça suffit maintenant—but in English. For real. Ça . . . suf . . . fit.

  Outside, there wasn’t much new to look at, apart from a silk-screened poster wheatpasted to a utility pole. It was of an empty, hivelike dress being picked at or else mended by crows. Even from where I sat, I could tell it was the work of an ex-friend—we were meant to. She was also Rob’s ex, but that’s not why we were ex-friends. We were ex-friends because of yet another ex—my first, who she didn’t approve of. You can’t ever get to the bottom of something by talking about one breakup. Providence is small; avoiding one another isn’t easy.

  You could see all the way down to three paint jobs ago on the triple-decker across the street: ochre, mint green, the red we call brick but that looks like dried blood. The clouds, meanwhile, were low and ragged, like old milk dumped into car-shop coffee. I watched them come together and break apart.

  Then the Kim or whoever just about skipped to her car—the color of the sky, almost, but metallic—and I climbed back inside and waited for Kit to clean up. I closed my eyes and sang a five-minute song in my head, with pauses for where only guitars would be. I tried to sway to them, like I would if I were all alone.

  In the kitchen, Kit was sticking her brushes into a yolk-crusted egg cup perched atop the day’s tower of mugs and burnt pots of grain and bowls of watery cereal milk. When it fell over, she picked up the unbroken wineglass, wedged it against the side of the sink, held it upright with an ice pack, and shoved in her brushes. When she was done, I tried to rinse out the cereal bowls, but couldn’t hold on to them.

  “Kit,” I said, rubbing my elbow. Did I want her to notice? Maybe. But it helped, and it’s not like I made a big show of it.

  “Yes, dear,” she said, looking at something else.

  “Could you do me favor and not leave your brushes in the sink.”

  “I need this, right now.”

  “I know you do, but—”

  “I don’t know that you do know.”

  “With you losing the house.”

  “There’s nothing left!” She took her glasses off h
er head and used them to cover her eyes. “So many still have it in for us,” she said.

  “Rob—”

  She made one of her faces.

  “Yeah, well—sure,” I said. “But we split the rent.”

  “I need to focus on my work right now.” Kit stroked the arm of the couch like it was a cat’s back, then picked at it like that cat’s mother.

  “I know Twinrock’s cold—” I said.

  “Fud hired someone.”

  “There’s money for that?”

  “Oh, he’ll never pay.”

  “Right. But that’s not . . .” This is where we always wound up, with long-standing feuds and torts and grievances, with exquisite corpses constructed from diary entries and hostile notes left on counters or tacked to bedroom doors. I took a breath. “I’m talking about brushes in the sink. I’m talking about staring directly into my former student’s vulva, first thing when I get home from teaching, and I also worked breakfast.”

  Kit opened her mouth, but I put up my hand.

  “Oh, and I almost said cunt, okay? That’s how pissed I am. I don’t want to think of vulvas as cunts. I don’t want to think of my students’ genitals, period.”

  “And last spring,” she said, like she was in the middle of a speech I had walked in on, “I stood naked in a room full of strangers in the desert and talked about my life.” She smoothed the couch-fabric pills she’d plucked up. “For the first time, I felt like myself. Like how I felt before all this. Before my shitass father lost control. And Fud, too. Before all these men. Your father . . . Before the fall.”

  I could smell the wine she snuck. I swore I could still smell Kim too, though I hadn’t before. I closed my eyes and saw that illustration of Alice in Wonderland’s neck stretching—of her growing too big for the room. The drawing used to keep me awake as a kid, so with a flourish, Kit would remove the book from my shelf before shutting the light. Like it was, in fact, the book’s fault. I called her Kit back then, too. “I may be your mother,” she would say, “but I am not a mom.” It was joke. But she meant it.

  “Look, Kit, I know how hard it is and how hard it must’ve been, but I have some needs here, too.”

  “And what makes you think these needs are somehow graver than mine? Whatsoever gives you that idea?”

  “This is my house!”

  “I have no home!”

  “Fuck! I know!”

  “Do you know my baby brother’s going to prison?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want to celebrate something. Can you blame me?”

  “That’s not—”

  “So you know her . . . this . . . girl. So what? She’s not ashamed. You think you know so much.”

  “You don’t even know her name.”

  Kit made the noise she makes when she knows I’m right. A wet little k, or a ch that sounds like k. Like Chk. “Look at your shame,” Kit said. “You owe it to yourself. You owe it to me!”

  When I realized she wasn’t going anywhere—because she couldn’t: she had nowhere to go—I grabbed my keys and left. It was still light out, somehow.

  The poster announced the first in a series of so-called Monthly Spectacles, meant to celebrate the grand opening of Polyesther, a women’s art collective that same ex-friend, Viv Goddard, had started in what had once been a knitted-underwear factory above a shuttered wig shop. Turned out those weren’t birds on the poster, but cats dressed as rabbits. The dress was made entirely of tampons, of course. I smiled, or tried to, at least. I really wanted to smile. Oh, Viv, I thought. We used to make each other pee our pants. Looking over my shoulder at the impossibly tiny house where Kit was almost certainly not cleaning up, I found myself wishing I’d handled things differently over the years, that I hadn’t burned quite so many bridges.

  I heard the squeak of an outdoor faucet and the rush of water onto the street. I looked to my left.

  “Hi, neighbor.”

  Georgie. I hadn’t seen him in a couple days, and one can always hope, but no such luck. I turned to the right and walked, not too quickly but purposefully, toward something I’d figure out when I got there.

  “Look, I’m your friend, okay?” Georgie said, shutting off his hose.

  I kept walking.

  “I’m your fucking friend!”

  Faster.

  “Alix!”

  My name in his gross mouth stopped me, but I didn’t turn around. “How do you know my name?” I said as calmly and firmly as I could.

  “Your mother,” he said.

  I wanted to slap the glasses off her face, shake her. “Well, it’s not yours to use.”

  “I’m just trying to be nice is all,” he said. “This is both of ours neighborhood.”

  He wasn’t wrong.

  “Motherfucker,” he said either at me or the hose, which came on all of a sudden. I walked as fast as I could without it becoming running.

  For a split second—like when you come down hard on an expected but nonexistent stair—I caught myself missing Rob, but just as quickly remembered that I was more scared of how he would react to stuff like this than to the stuff itself. “You are choosing to live here,” he said. “These are all choices you get to make,” he added, hitting both the you and the get. I just wanted to know which was the first such choice. I just wanted to know where I went wrong.

  I mean, I know where—meaning with whom—but I couldn’t tell Rob. Not about Eli. Are you kidding? Rob would literally kill him.

  But first I needed to find Kit someplace where she could spread out. Problem was, my apartment was too little and Kit only had new friends. Once, when I asked her whatever became of the latest someone I liked but all of a sudden never saw anymore, she said, “Oh, she got old.” This someone was thirty, but I was sixteen, so I didn’t know how to respond yet. I must’ve made a face, because Kit sniffed. “Well, I happen to like young people. They’re not . . . stuck.” She pushed those exact same glasses up her nose, her mouth a small, tight O. Stuck. Stuck. Stuck. It sounded like onomatopoeia. In another few years I’d know firsthand that it was. Now, at the corner, I said it aloud, “Stuck.” There was another Polyesther poster. Jesus. They were everywhere. Around the corner, someone honked in front of someone else’s house instead of getting out and ringing the bell.

  Wait, I thought, why not? Kit’s a lady. And an artist, I guess. And Viv will like her—like how she used to like me, maybe. I turned sharply west and walked down Broadway toward Olneyville Square.

  _____________

  Viv was a friend, my best friend, whatever that means or meant, but hadn’t been since I started dating—by which I mean fucking—my first boyfriend, Eli, who was also my high school English teacher. “You have boys in your head,” Viv told me more than once.

  But first, three quick things about Eli before you get all bent out of shape. I don’t care if you believe them:

  It was love, not just lust. For Eli at least. For me it was lust, pretty much. He had puffy upper arms—which you either get or don’t get—and smelled like Coke ingredients and just-opened-up lake house. Like the start of someone else’s summer. Fuck you, that’s how I felt. He also had eyes that looked like they were looking at something far away, except when they looked right at you, when they took you in. He loved me, and we both had a hard time saying goodbye. And in the end, that’s what this is really about.

  I’d turned eighteen the second week of the school year, before he probably even had my name down, so I was an adult. And he was just twenty-two.

  Eli had my yes every step of the way, so, his contract and basic professional ethics aside, it wasn’t wrong exactly, just weird, but even then only in retrospect. The first time around, you can’t help but miss the point, and what isn’t weird? Have you ever been to France? Or so much as talked with a French person about sex? But how else are you supposed to learn, they say. Plus, the word weird is boring and sad and says much more about the person who uses it than it does about the
person, place, or thing it fails to describe. Weird and closure are the only nonracist or sexist words I won’t let my students use. But I wouldn’t let them get away with any of this. Too much exposition, I would write in the margins. Or else, Discursive. I’m all over the place. But then life is never chronological when you’re trying your best to share it with someone else. Do as I say, I’d say, not as I . . . you know.

  Twelve years ago, now. I didn’t know who I was yet, but even so, it didn’t take me long to realize that Eli didn’t know who he was either and took the not knowing much harder than I did. He took most things hard. When we fought, which with time was more and more, he would tear his clothes and hit himself in the head as if he were hitting someone else. Since then I’ve learned that’s just how addicts are, like two different people giving each other a hard time at the same time—that is if you’re the kind of person who likes to look at people as collections of symptoms that can and should be treated, which I’m not sure I am.

  But this was about Viv.

  When I met her, she carried her things in a construction worker’s lunch box, even her art, increasingly the only thing of hers not covered in paint splatters. The big black boots she showed up with at the beginning of sophomore year were splattered white within a week, but her drawings and photos were small and clean and curled into tubes. We had no classes together, but I smiled at her in the hallway once or twice. She smiled back. There was a telephone pole down the block from school. When we walked past it on our way to Thayer Street, we’d talk. We were friends past the pole. I told her about the pole. “I’m leaving in a week, you know,” she said. She was transferring to a girls’ school. There was the tampon incident, of course, but really she’d just had enough. Who could blame her?