Eden

by Andrea Kleine

  It started to rain. A few drops at first. You barely noticed it. Then you saw it on the ground, dappling the brown leaves and dirt. Then it was pouring. My hair was getting wet. My thighs were getting cold. My ears were cold. I moved my head from side to side trying to dislodge the hair tucked behind my ears. I thought even with my hair wet, if it covered my ears they would be warmer. My muscles were tired. It was raining on my face. I wanted to wipe my nose but couldn’t. Larry hitched his jacket up over his head and walked back to his truck. I bent my head forward and looked at the ground.

  I started to cry.

  I thought, No one is going to find us. No one knows where we are. We don’t know where we are. It’s Saturday now. If Luce finally picked up my dad from where he got his car towed and then they went to Larry’s to pick us up, they wouldn’t find us there. Larry’s weird cousin doesn’t know where we went. He didn’t want to hang around us. And maybe my dad didn’t know Larry at all. Maybe Larry was a rapist who picked up girls from bus stations with a good story. What happened to Dad? Did Larry kidnap him too? Or did he never show up? If my dad got the weekends mixed up and never came to pick us up, then no one will wonder where we are until Sunday, when my mom goes to the bus station to get us and we’re not on the bus. Then she will call my dad and ask if we took a later bus and why didn’t he tell her before she left the house so she wouldn’t have to go down to the bus station twice. And our dad will say, What are you talking about, it’s not my weekend. And my mom will say, Are you kidding me? I put them on the bus Friday afternoon. And then they will think it is our fault. That Eden put me up to it. That we wanted to do something like go hang out at a friend’s house all weekend. A friend whose parents were away for the weekend. A place where all teenage kids descend and raid the liquor cabinet. My mom will yell at my dad saying why didn’t he check with her about changing weekends. She will say the girls don’t get to decide about this. There are other people involved, she will say. They need to learn some consideration and responsibility. She is basically saying that about my dad, even though she is blaming us. My dad will say no one told him about anything. He will say it wasn’t his weekend, they were here last week. And my mom will say no they weren’t, check your calendar. She will hang up. She will drive home and start to call all our friends, try to figure out where we are. She is not mad that we would change the weekend to go to a friend’s, she is mad that we wouldn’t consult her. She likes to have dialogues about things. She doesn’t like to be cut out of the process. You have to tell me, she would say. And eventually my dad would think to check his calendar. The Save the Wildlife calendar with pictures of different, almost-extinct animals for each month that hangs in the kitchen next to the refrigerator. He knows he is right and my mom is making a big deal out of nothing. He thinks that’s what my mom always does. That kids will be kids and we are at that age and you’ve got to allow them some freedom to explore and make mistakes and figure out who they are. He would say you don’t want them to be little automaton versions of you and me. He will be rehearsing a version of this speech in his head for when my mom calls to apologize. And he thinks about how he will get to be the bigger person and say, Don’t worry about it.

  But then he will glance at the calendar. He’ll do it for validation. To feel good about himself. To pat himself on the back for being a good divorced dad. And first he will stare at the calendar. He will wonder what day it is today. What week it is. He will squint at the dates. He will tap at them with his finger. He will run his finger along the weeks. He will be confused. He will check to see if the correct month is displayed. Then he will start to get nervous. His stomach will feel dry. He won’t know what to do. His legs will be frozen. Luce might come in and notice him standing there and start talking to him, but then she will say, What’s wrong? And my dad will finally snap out of it and grab the phone and desperately dial my mom’s number and start talking very fast in circles trying to explain himself, and he might start crying and he’ll ask my mom if she’s found us yet. And my mom will tell him to call the police where he lives.

  But all that won’t happen until tomorrow in the afternoon. Today and tomorrow. Almost two whole days. Here in the woods it is only Eden and me. And no one will save us. No one will think we need saving for almost two days. Anything can happen in those almost two days. And Eden is tied up too. And she is scared. She thinks this is her fault because she didn’t want to use the phone and she is the one who said we should go with Larry when I didn’t want to go. And she’s the one who wanted to hang out with him and smoke pot and drink beer. And somewhere in the back of her head she feels bad about that. But right now she is afraid.

  Eden can’t save me, I thought, and that thought made me cry. My big sister can’t help me she can’t save me she can’t get me out of here. She is here, but I am alone.

  16

  “What play?” Noreen asked.

  I was at my desk in the railroad apartment Noreen and I had moved into together. My desk was in the windowless middle room that also served as a closet for our closetless bedroom. I was reading an email from my old professor Cortland with the subject line “Good News.” Right when I graduated from college, I had written a play called Bind Me. Cortland had nominated it for an award for new playwrights and it won. I was twenty-two at the time, and I used the money to go to Greece to participate in a production directed by Nico Kis, an aging star of European experimental theater who had once worked with Fassbinder, then spent a decade kicking heroin. He taught a workshop my last semester in college. Nico walked in the first day of class, a scrawny queen dressed in an oversized 1940s-vintage men’s suit, his hair dyed an aggressive cherry red. He looked not unlike a smaller, more ferocious David Byrne. He said, in his gravelly, sort of French, sort of Hungarian accent, “I apologize, but I must smoke in class.” And so we all smoked in class except for one girl who complained, and then we couldn’t smoke in class and Nico was forced to gnaw on licorice-flavored twigs from the health food store, which made him look feral. We loved Nico. When I acted, he would stare at me and breathe heavily through his nose. “I love what you’re doing, but the audience won’t. You’re too internal. The audience is too stupid. I hate the audience, but without them we’re nothing.” It was Nico who told me to give up acting and become a playwright. “Fassbinder is dead,” Nico said. “There are no more good roles for faggots like us.”

  All of my friends were going to Nico’s in Greece. Jamie was going. But I didn’t have the money, since none of my parents were the type to give me cash as a graduation present. Then suddenly, when I got that award, I had the money to go. But when we all arrived in Greece we found out the production had fallen through. The theater said it had been canceled weeks before. Nico was in Budapest and he wasn’t coming. He left no apologetic note for us. We were a small group of poor American theater students, which didn’t make sense to the theater people in Greece, who assumed we were all rich. They didn’t give us the free hotel rooms they’d promised, the youth hostel was full up with Swedish tourists and had no beds for us, so we slept on the beach. We made friends on the beach with the girls who worked in the kitchen at the youth hostel, and they let us sneak in to take showers in the morning and told us to blend in with the Swedes to get free breakfast. Jamie got the idea that we should reenact the theater department’s production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest that we did last year. After all, we were shipwrecked on an island. We performed it one night on the beach and someone passed the hat and we made enough money to all go out to dinner. One of the waitresses at the restaurant started drinking with us and later took me downstairs to the basement where there was a break room with a couch, and we fucked on the ratty couch. After that, Jamie and I got free lunch at that restaurant, and Jamie said, “Finally you’re beginning to understand how to get ahead in the world.” One night the police gave us a ticket for having a campfire on the beach, but we couldn’t read it, so we threw it in the trash.

  Cortland said that a theater festival in London w
anted to produce all of the plays that had won the same playwrights’ award over the past ten years. He said Nico wanted to direct my play. The festival couldn’t offer me much money, but it would put me up in a hotel when I got there and feed me. I would be a part of the rehearsals. I would have to pay my own way there, but my small fee would cover the cost of the ticket. Let me know as soon as possible if you can confirm, Cortland wrote. I think this would be a good opportunity for the London scene to get to know you.

  “You’re basically going to London for three weeks and not getting paid,” Noreen said. I said this was a great opportunity. “I don’t see the ‘great’ part,” Noreen said. I said no one was getting paid, and Noreen said, “I’ll bet Cortland is getting paid.” I didn’t have anything to say to that, because he probably was getting paid, since he would be there longer than me, seemed to be organizing the whole thing, and was on the nominating committee for the award. I said he probably gets paid by the university from some sort of fund. “You never stand up for yourself,” Noreen muttered as she walked out of the room.

  I excitedly called Jamie. “This. Is. Really. Fantastic,” he said slowly. He asked if Nico was using the same staging as in the original production. Jamie had choreographed the play when we did it at a storefront theater in New York, right after Greece. I said I didn’t think so. I didn’t know what Nico was planning. “But the direction, how it was choreographed, that’s what made your play. I mean, Hope, I think I should be a part of this. I should be there with you and Nico.” It was true that Jamie contributed a lot to the play, and he figured out how to do the complicated physical things in the script. I told him I would talk to Cortland about it but doubted I had any say in the matter. “You’re the playwright,” Jamie said. “Of course you have say in the matter.”

  I avoided asking Cortland because I knew the answer would be no. Jamie pestered me about it, and I said I hadn’t heard anything. I said Cortland was writing in a cabin somewhere in Iceland, near a volcano, and he wasn’t checking email very often. I said he was waiting to hear from Nico and the people in London. I said it might be a problem because of visas or unions or something. I wrote emails to Cortland but didn’t send them. I mentioned it to Noreen. “Why do you feel hesitant about asking him? Don’t you want Jamie to help you with the play?” I said I wasn’t sure. Noreen asked, “Which play is this? Have I read it?”

  Noreen hadn’t read it, so I gave her a copy of the script.

  In the play, two girls are tied together back to back, naked. Someone has dragged them into the woods and left them there. The stage is littered with dead leaves that Jamie and I raked up from Tompkins Square Park. The girls can’t remember anything. They can’t remember if something has happened to them or if something is about to happen to them. Slowly, still tied up, they manage to wiggle around and face each other, embraced and entwined, and they begin to have thrashing sex. They thrash around the floor so furiously that the ropes unravel and unwind. When they finally stand up, the lights swirl and a loud sound score comes on. The girls look out at the audience, then up, and the lights dazzle as if a UFO is about to land. Then the theater goes completely black. When the lights come back up, only one girl is there, naked and alone. The other girl doesn’t come back for the curtain call. Only one girl takes a bow. And then leaves the stage.

  “This is a very weird play,” Noreen said when she finished reading it.

  “I was young,” I said.

  “What’s it supposed to be about?”

  I hated talking about my work. I recited the description I used for writing grants. “It’s about two people who are connected and then ripped apart.” Noreen looked more confused by my generic sentence. I said, “Critics thought it was a statement about queer love. This struggle, this self-definition, this defiant physical sex that leads to their freedom, but then they are literally struck down by external forces, and in the end, we’re all alone.” Noreen was still looking at me strangely. “People really connected to the ending,” I said. “They said that after watching this long struggle where the characters try to get out of the ropes, and then this really long sex scene, that when they finally get rid of the ropes and stand up, the actors are so physically exhausted, and then one of them vanishes and doesn’t come back. The audience really feels alone. They feel the loss,” I said. “They said it felt universal.”

  Noreen looked down at the script in her lap. She fingered one of the brass binder studs holding the three-hole-punched paper together. It was a short script mostly full of physical directions. I spent hours at a Kinko’s copying photos from the production and putting them in the script so readers would have an idea what it looked like.

  “But why did you write it?” Noreen asked.

  17

  When I left my dad’s, I thought I would drive The Camper all the way back to New York, but it started raining and I was immobile on the Beltway for almost an hour, until I followed an aggressive driver who bluntly cut across three lanes and drove on the shoulder to the nearest exit. I followed him and someone else followed me and my passenger-side wiper decided to quit and half my view was severed, so I pulled into the parking lot of the first restaurant I saw.

  I hopped from The Camper through vertical sheets of icy rain to the entrance and was sopping wet when I pulled open the door. It was an upscale Mexican restaurant with sculpted terra-cotta-colored walls that made the place look like a cave. Electric candles flickered in nooks. The carefully designed glow would have felt cozy and warm, but it was too early for dinner and the only person there was sitting at the bar.

  I sat down at a table and took off my soaked jacket. I wiped my face and arms dry with two cloth napkins and then piled them in a damp heap on the edge of the table where a waitress could easily take the hint to get rid of them. I sniffed and wiped my nose. I was cold. I ordered a hot tea just to hold something warm. The waitress placed it in front of me and I hovered over the steam, pressing my hands around the mug.

  “Hey, over there.”

  The bartender and her customer were chatting. Snickering about something. They were the only other people in the restaurant, but I assumed they weren’t talking to me.

  “Hey there, lonely girl,” the bartender called out. I looked over. She was smiling. The guy sitting at the bar was looking over his shoulder at me. “Don’t make me ask if I can copy your chemistry homework,” she said. I didn’t get the joke, if she was making one. “Hope,” she said, “you can sit over there and we can ignore you, or you can join us and I can make your hour a happy one.”

  I stood up and walked over, slightly dazed, taking my tea with me, my shoes squeaking wet. The bartender gestured to her chest with both hands. “Layla,” she said. And then, not believing my confusion, “From high school. Or have you blocked all of that out?”

  “Oh, hey,” I said, smiling awkwardly at the weirdness of it all. Of running into a friend from high school at a suburban Mexican restaurant nowhere near where we went to school. Of not recognizing Layla, although she looked the same, just harsher, her hair dyed dark, her eyeliner still thick. She wore a black T-shirt that had a quote in Spanish swirling in white ribbony script that I couldn’t quite read. I sat down at the bar, leaving a stool between me and Layla’s friend. “Sorry,” I said. Layla reached across the bar and hugged me with one arm. “Yikes, you’re soaked.” She refilled my mug with hot water and added a healthy shot of whiskey, then disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a gray hooded sweatshirt. “It’s clean,” she said, “but put it on even if it isn’t, so you don’t get pneumonia.” Her friend laughed. His name was Sam. He had tattoos creeping up from the collar of his shirt and a stud piercing below his bottom lip.

  Layla passed me the sweatshirt. I didn’t like to borrow clothes from my friends. I never wore Noreen’s clothes even though most of them would have fit me. But I was freezing, so I put it on, threading my arms into the sleeves. Layla reached over and pulled the hood up over my head and pressed the sides of my skull, blotting out the wa
ter from my hair. Then she pushed the hood back down and mussed my bangs.

  Layla’s friend Sam asked where I was from, and I said New York. He said, “You don’t sound like you’re from New York,” and I said I wasn’t. “So you’re from New York and you’re not from New York.” “I live in New York,” I said, “but I grew up not too far from here.” Layla was shoveling ice in a bin under the bar and heard only half the conversation. “She’s from Charlottesville, like me,” she said. I said, “Yeah, and my dad lived up near here.” Sam said, “That makes sense, you don’t seem like you’re from here either.” “She left a long time ago,” Layla said, “and she never came back to visit. She figured out early on that it was a shithole.” I said, “It’s not a shithole.” And Layla said, “History likes to rewrite itself.”

  “Whether it’s a shithole or not,” Sam said, “it’s probably not the same place it was when you grew up. Everything’s constantly changing. The place where you’re from no longer exists.” He took a sip of his beer. Layla cleared away my empty mug and replaced it with a pint of beer. “Good riddance,” she said.

  “So,” Sam said, “you’re from New York now. And someday you won’t be. Just like you’re no longer from here. Life is a series of orphanages. Sad but true.”

  “My Daddy Warbucks is going to show up someday,” Layla said.

  “Never happens,” Sam said. “We’re all waiting around for it to happen. Never does.”

  “Isn’t he a ray of sunshine?” Layla asked. I smiled. Sam slid off of his barstool and went to take a piss.

  Layla asked me what I was doing here, and I said I was looking for my sister. That I hadn’t seen her in years and needed to get in touch with her, but she was sort of off the grid and that made it hard to find her. Layla said, “I don’t remember your sister. Was she older or younger than us?” “She was older,” I said. “Was she in school with us?” Layla asked. “Yes,” I said, “but she went to a different school after.”