Halfway Down the Stairs

by Gary A Braunbeck

  Crime began to spread through the town: holdups, street fights, petty thefts, and acts of vandalism.

  And in the center of it all stood the plant, a hulking, roaring dinosaur, fighting desperately against its own extinction as it sank into the tar of progress.

  Amanda discovered Jane Eyre in the library one day. Over the next month she read it three times—

  —and the dinosaur howled in the night—

  —and her mother at day’s end sat staring at the television or listening to her scratchy old record—

  —and her father's eyes filled with more fear and shame as he came to realize he was never going to be called back to work—

  —and somewhere inside Amanda a feeling awakened. She did what she could to squash it but it never really went away.

  So sometimes, very late at night when shameful fantasies are indulged, she took a certain private pleasure as she lay in her bed, and usually felt like hell afterward, remembering the words to a nursery rhyme her mother used to read to her when she was a child:

  "Mirror, mirror, tell me true

  Am I pretty or am I plain?

  Or am I downright ugly?

  And ugly to remain?"

  No man would ever want her in that special, heated, passionate way. She was too plain, and the plain did not inspire great passion.

  Mirror, mirror, told her true.

  3. “...She Was Alone When I Got There.”

  Amanda finished giving her statement to one of the police officers on the scene (who failed to ask for her address and home phone number until she volunteered the information) and was getting ready to leave when she saw the man who'd taken her spot in the booth. His shirt was spattered with dried blood and his face was three shades whiter than pale. He looked up from his shaking hands for a moment, through the swirling visibar lights and milling patrons, past the police officer who was taking his statement, and stared at her.

  It seemed to her that she ought to say something to him—but what?

  Before she could come up with an answer she found herself walking across the parking lot and coming up next to him. He was no longer looking at her—if he actually had been in the first place. He ran a hand through his hair and turned toward the officer beside him.

  “You say she just doubled over suddenly?” asked the officer.

  “Uh, yeah, yeah. It was weird, y’know? We're sitting there talking and then she starts...blinking. I'm thinking to myself, ‘Oh, Christ, she's lost a contact lens,’ then she bends over, real violently, like maybe she's gonna throw up or something and I moved out of the booth to, y'know, help her get out and over toward the bathroom but she's making this sound, this awful sound like she's choking and now I'm shaking 'cause I've never had to Heimlich someone but she sounds in pain, serious pain, and I reached over to grab her and she pulls away and covers her eyes with her hands, and now she's groaning and wheezing and people around us are looking, so I reach for her again and that's when I see there's all this...blood coming out from under her hands. It was fuckin' horrible.”

  The officer finished writing something down, then said, “Was there anyone else in the booth with her?”

  “No. She was alone when I got there.”

  Amanda turned away, biting down on her lower lip as if that would be enough to shield her from the invisible fist that had just rammed into her gut, and half-walked, half-ran to her car where she checked her eyes—no, not her eyes, not hers at all—again in the rearview mirror, then turned the key in the ignition, backed out, and drove away.

  She had no idea how long or how far she drove, only that she had to stay in motion while the numb shock of realization ebbed into a dull thrum of remorse. She hadn't meant for anything to happen to the woman, not at all, but—

  —Was there anyone else in the booth no she was alone when I got there no she was alone no she was ALONE—

  —bastard had bumped right into her. Right into her.

  Twenty deadened minutes later, feeling very much like an etherized patient on the anesthetist's table, she parked in front of a church, stepped out of the car, then walked up the steps and through the doors, pausing only to dip her fingers in the marble font of holy water and make the Sign of the Cross over her forehead and bosom, then strode down the aisle, through a set of small wooden doors, lowering to her knees as she pulled the doors closed and a small overhead light snapped on—

  "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned."

  Kneeling in the confessional, her voice that of a disembodied ghost, Amanda felt as if she were being operated by remote control, only vaguely aware of the words coming out of her mouth, mundane sins—cursing, lusting, small acts of thievery like sometimes not putting a quarter in the box at work when she got a cup of coffee, sins of omission, white lies, I meant no harm, then she was whispering, humiliated, about impure thoughts that still moved her blood faster and still took her to a private place where moist fantasies waited for her...

  ...and in one of these private places where plain-faced fantasies lay hidden, she was as beautiful as she wished to be and with a man who not only loved her but desired her as a result of that love, his lips moving down the slope of her breasts, his tongue tracing soft circular patterns around her nipple—

  She was suddenly, awkwardly aware of the claustrophobic silence in the confessional, and wondered how long she'd been quiet.

  On the other side of the screen the priest asked, "Are you all right?"

  She pulled a compact from her purse, opening it to examine her eyes in the mirror. "No."

  "What’s really wrong?" His voice was soft and velvety, like Burt Lancaster’s in Atlantic City. She wondered what the priest looked like; maybe he was young, perhaps handsome and—

  —stop it right now, you're bordering on pathetic.

  She almost rose but hesitated for some reason, and in that moment the soothing male voice on the other side said, "Please, ma'am—uh, miss—if you can, try to forget that you’re talking to a priest. I know that sounds trivial but you might be surprised how much it helps some people. You could pretend I'm a close friend—"

  "—don't have any real close friends—"

  "—then your mother or father, maybe a sister—"

  "—my parents are dead and I don't—"

  She blinked, realizing something. True, she had no siblings, had been an only child—

  —but she did have sisters, nonetheless.

  In restaurants, in the lobbies of movie theaters, standing in the checkout line at the grocery store or wandering the aisles of video rental stores twenty minutes before closing, they were there, her sisters, waiting for something that would probably never come along, waiting alone, always looking toward a place not imagined by the beautiful or ugly, a spartan, isolated place reserved for the plain, for those never noticed, not bothered with; every so often their eyes would meet her own and Amanda would detect a glint of recognition in their gaze: I know just how you feel and just what you're going through, and I'd smile if I could but it’d probably look awkward, if not absurd, so I’ll just go on my way and promise you that I’ll remember your face, one much like my own, and I’ll wish you well, and good luck, you'll need it.

  Then it was through the checkout, down the next video aisle, into the darkness of the movie theater, or out of the dining room and into the night, never speaking, never allowing for a moment of tenderness, keep that guard up because it's all you've got, and it should be enough, that guard, but sometimes it wasn't, sometimes it slipped and something painful leaked inside, or something ugly slipped out—

  —she was snapped out of her reverie by the ghost of her voice.

  "When I was a child my mother used to play this one record over and over, I don't know where she got it, Dad had bought the record player for me—it was one of those models that came in a carrying case, it had this really heavy arm—but Mom, she had this one record, the only one she owned, an old ‘78, a Nat King Cole song called ‘There Will Never Be Another You’ or something like
that. It was one of the sappiest songs I ever heard, I never understood why she liked it so much. But she did, she loved it, and she used to have a few shots of whiskey after my dad went to bed, then she'd play that record over and over, until she got this dreamy look on her face, sitting there in her chair and listening to that song and pretending she wasn't who she was. Sometimes I could see it in her face, that wish. She was someone else and the song wasn't on a record, it was being sung to her by some handsome lover come to court her, to ask for her hand and take her away to a better life than the one she had, the kind of life she'd dreamed of when she was the age I am now. I used to sneak downstairs and watch her do this, and I'd laugh to myself, you know? I'd laugh at her because I knew that my life was going to turn out differently, I'd never be so stupid as to wind up marrying a man who didn't really love me like a husband should but I stayed with him anyway because that's what the Church told me I was supposed to do. I'd never do that. I'd never spend my days working around the house, doing the dishes and the laundry and the dusting, having no life of my own, no hobbies, no interests, spending half the afternoon fixing dinner, then half the evening cleaning up afterward, only finding time for myself after everyone went to bed and I could sip my whiskey and play a goddamn record by Nat King Cole about there never being another me. I mean, I was just a kid, I was only in grade school, and Mom was old and used up and kind of funny at those times. But now it's twenty years later and here I am, just like her—hell, I even have that record of hers! It’s the only thing that was really hers that I have, just like my dad’s old straight-razor. A couple of award-winning keepsakes, huh? I look at these things of theirs, then I look at my life and...I try to keep the bad feelings at bay but sometimes it doesn't work. I've turned into her. There's no man who loves me, all I've got is my work, and instead of whiskey and Nat King Cole I've got two weak cocktails on Friday night after work and Jane Eyre or well-thumbed collections of poetry or a ton of videotapes, most of them romantic comedies. My God, if I had any kids they'd be laughing at me now, sneaking down after I think they're asleep and watching Mom get all teary-eyed over a book or movie or poem. They'd look at me and laugh and say, 'Look at her, she thinks she's Katherine Hepburn or something.' Most of the time I can get by but on nights like tonight I...I feel so lonely I could scream, so I tell myself that at least there's my job, at least there's a place I can go where I won't have to think about how I feel, except now I work with a bunch of other people, most of them women—and younger than me—and they all want to tell me about their love lives. 'You've got a kind way about you,' they say, or 'You're such a good listener.'

  "Oh God, when I hear them going on about their love lives, how it's so hard being in a relationship because they don't agree on...on what kinds of toppings to get on a pizza or who should make the first move or how truthful they should be or why they don't feel comfortable making a serious commitment just yet...when I hear all this, I really want to slap them sometimes, you know? They have no idea how it feels to be the 'nice' girl who's always there, always willing to listen, the girl you can call anytime because she's always home, who's friendly and reliable like an old dog or five bucks from Grandma in your birthday card every year. I know I'm not the most stunning woman ever to walk the face of the Earth, but...." She reached into her purse for a tissue to wipe some of the perspiration off her face. Unable to find one, she kept searching around while she spoke.

  "It's amazing how relaxed a man can be when he's in the presence of a woman he thinks doesn't need or want passion. I don't know how many times I've had a guy I know make a mock pass at me, then we'll both laugh like it was no big thing. I'm not feeling sorry for myself, that's too damned easy, and I know that I'm plain, but the thing is, because I'm plain, I'm safe. And safe means being rendered sexless."

  She took a breath, weighing the truth of that word.

  "Sexless. And sometimes I'd like to pull all these people aside who are so overwrought about their shaky sex lives and whisper that word to them, because it's a feeling they'll never know. Because with all their whining and crying and bitching and all their melodramatic romantic suffering, they'll always be able to find someone who wants them, even if it's just for one night. And I'd like to know how it feels from their side, just once. To be wanted that way just once, to be that beautiful for just one night."

  She looked toward the small tinted glass separating her face from the priest's, caught sight of her face, saw the azure eyes, and remembered the other woman's screams.

  "It hurts, Father. Sometimes it physically hurts! I don't know how but I...I did something tonight, caused something to happen. I didn't mean for her to get hurt, to suffer like she did, but I—"

  The words clogged in her throat when her hand brushed against something inside of her purse.

  Something small.

  Soft.

  Moist.

  And round.

  "What is it?" asked the faceless priest.

  Amanda couldn't answer.

  She opened the top of her purse wider, then slowly looked down inside, tilting it toward the dim light.

  Then she saw them.

  Saw them and gasped and snapped closed her purse and leapt from the confessional and ran down the aisle sobbing, the sound of her grief echoing off the wide arches above as she kept running, wanting to rip the purse off her shoulder and throw it away and never look inside again, wanting to close her eyes—not her eyes, not hers at all, just different eyes in her head—close them forever and not have to face her reflection or see the way other people looked at her, close the eyes and make everything go away, deny that what had happened was real and make everything better by that denial but she knew it was true and didn't understand why, and now she was outside the church, running down the stone stairs, the priest following and calling for her to stop, please, stop, but she couldn't, she was too frightened as she threw herself in the car and flung the purse into the back seat, slammed the door, and pulled away, the houses and street signs blurring as she sped past, lights melting, images flowing into one another like paint on an artist's canvas, blues into tears into yellows into aches into reds—

  ...Talking of Michelangelo....

  —into greens into curses and back to blues, signs guiding her way, STOP, YIELD, ONE WAY, ROAD CLOSED AHEAD, rounding the corner, finding detours, familiar trees, lonely trees and this empty street, dark houses, dirty fences, take a breath, there you go, calm down, take another breath, slow down, breathe in, out, in, out, that's good, that's a good girl, slow it down, pull it over, close to the curb, there ya go, here we are, home sweet, ignition off, keys out, all stopped, all safe, alone, alone, alone.

  She stared at the front of her house, then turned around and lifted her purse as if she had only—

  —only—

  —only one way to know for sure.

  She took a deep breath, exhaled, then opened her purse and looked inside.

  Silence; stillness.

  She calmly reached in and took them out, holding one in each hand like a jeweler examining uncut diamonds.

  They were still quite moist, sheened in corneal fluid.

  No sparkle now.

  But still a striking enough hazel.

  She felt a pang of remorse, for until this moment she'd never realized how pretty her old eyes had been.

  "God, I'm gonna miss you," she whispered.

  Then looked up into the night sky, into the depths of a cold, unanswering, indifferent heaven, where no angel of the plain-faced looked back down.

  4. Discards

  One afternoon, shortly after moving back home, she had wandered down to a local flea market and found a table covered with dolls. Among them was a set of mismatched nesting dolls ("Matryoshka dolls," said the old woman sitting behind the table. “You must always call them by their proper name."); the largest was the size and shape of a gourd, the second largest was almost pyramid-shaped, the next was an oval, the fourth like a pear, and the last resembled an egg. What surprised her was
that each of them, despite their disparate shapes, was able to fit neatly inside the next, and the next, and so on, until there was only the original matryoshka holding all the rest inside.

  She carefully examined the largest doll, somewhat shaken that its face bore a certain resemblance to her own. The artist had captured not only the basics of her face but its subtleties, as well: the way the corners of her eyes scrinched up when she was smiling but didn't want anyone to know what she was smiling about, the mischievous pout of her mouth when she had good news to tell and was bursting for someone to ask the right question so she could blurt it out, the curve of her cheekbones that looked almost regal when she chose to accent them with just the right amount of rouge—all these details leapt out at her, impressive and enigmatic, their craftsmanship nothing short of exquisite, as if the hand which painted them had been blessed by God.

  She looked away for a moment, then looked back; no, she hadn't imagined it. The thing did look a little like her.

  As she was paying for the set, the old woman behind the table told her, "The old Russian mystics claimed that the matryoshka had certain powers, that if a person believed strongly enough in the scene the dolls portrayed when taken apart and set side-by-side-by-side, then it would come true. A lot of old-country matchmakers used to fashion matryoshkas for the women of their village who were trying to find a husband and start their own families. It's said that someone created a set for Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt that showed her marrying Nicholas II and having several children."

  "Wouldn't it be nice if that were true?" said Amanda.

  "But this set here, I have no idea what someone would want with it. Especially a young girl like you. None of the dolls resemble one another. It's like a bunch of riffraff, discards. Though it's odd, isn't it, how all of them fit together so well?"

  "I like discards," Amanda replied. "It's nice to think that even the unwanted can find others like themselves and become a family."

  "But these're all women."