Halfway Down the Stairs

by Gary A Braunbeck

  "Shhh, don't apologize, it was just as good this way."

  "The halo's around you now, around your whole body."

  She looked toward the mirror and saw that the moonlight had moved to her side of the bed, its light glinting off her sweat, making her glow, and she felt as if she were glowing from somewhere deep within, from a place only another woman might understand.

  "I wish moments like this would never end," she said, not only to the man next to her but to the shadow-shape sisters filling the room. "Right now I don't want any of this to go away, not the sweat, not the stains, not your fingers touching me, not this...this pounding in my chest."

  "I know how you feel," he said, his fingertips tracing subtle patterns on her bare, slick belly.

  "Do you? Do you really? I wonder. I—no, please, don’t...mmm, don't stop doing that, okay, it's just...it's just that right now I wish there was something more powerful, more ethereal to help me express this feeling. There should be a new language, you know? One that can only be spoken between two people who've just made love, only then, and only until the sun comes up or they have to get out of bed and go their separate ways. I know that must seem kind of silly to you—"

  "—no, not at all."

  She smiled at him, then placed a finger against his lips.

  For a while, neither of them spoke; she wouldn't allow it.

  Laying her head against his solid, washboard-sculpted stomach, she closed her eyes and for a few minutes became lost in a pleasant limbo, neither awake nor dreaming, just lost in contented stillness of her body, heart, and mind, turning her face toward his flesh and kissing his chest, feeling his body tense ever so slightly, and soon they were making love again, less frenzied this time, more patiently, taking the time to enjoy each other’s bodies in ways they hadn't bothered with before, and this time she came with him inside of her (though he did have to reach down and use his hand again as well, but that was all right), then they both fell asleep for a few minutes; when they awoke she could sense his trying to think of a tactful way to broach the subject of leaving. She decided to save him the trouble and, lifting her head, swallowed once and said, in a hoarse, throaty, deeply satisfied voice, “Uh, listen, I've got a long day tomorrow and I've never been much of a morning person, so if you wouldn’t mind—”

  She watched as he dressed himself in silence, then leaned over, kissed her bare back, and left.

  She waited until she heard the front door close behind him, then kneaded her vagina, soaking her palms and fingers in his juices as well as her own, then pulled her hands up and pressed them against her face, inhaling the rich, wet scent of their sex.

  With her hands still pressed firmly against her face, she began to cry.

  There are lonely ones who by nature cannot hold on to their joy, no matter how hard they try. Like the acne-scarred man in the pub, something in Amanda had been trained since childhood never to trust happiness.

  She’d learned her lesson well, and felt damned because of it.

  And empty, so empty, empty, empty...

  "Do you remember?" asked one of the shadow-shape sisters. "Do you remember that time in the sixth grade when Tommy Smeltzer ran over and kissed you right on the mouth? You were surprised because you'd had a crush on him for so long but didn't think he even knew you were alive."

  "I remember," said Amanda.

  "Do you remember," asked another sister, "how you tried to put your arms around him but he grabbed your wrists all of a sudden? He twisted your arms behind your back while a couple of his friends threw mud in your hair, then left you in the middle of the playground?"

  "...yes..."

  Another shadow-sister moved closer. "Remember the way all of the girls stopped jumping rope and made a big circle around you and pointed and laughed? You never forgot that sound, did you? You closed your eyes and asked God to let you die right there and then because you didn't think anyone would want to be friends with you after that."

  "...they never did."

  "And you spent the rest of your grade-school recesses leaning against the chain-link fence that surrounded the playground, wishing that someone would come over and ask you to play with them."

  "I thought I’d forgotten that."

  Another sister moved closer. "You never tried to make any friends after that, ever, not even after you were in high school. You were always afraid you'd get laughed at. Why have you spent so many years putting mud in your own hair?"

  "...don't know, I...I don't know. Scared, I guess. So scared, all the time." She wiped her eyes, then rose from the bed and crossed to one of her bookshelves, kneeling down to scan the spines until she found the one she was looking for.

  She flipped through the pages of her college yearbook, remembering the endless nights of waitressing and typing term papers and even working as an operator for one of those I-900 "psychic revelations" lines that helped foot most of her bills as she worked toward her degree, then came her first secretarial job at the insurance company, which led to another, more important position as she studied for the first of the endless actuarial exams, going at the books day and night and weekends, acing most of them on the second or third try—

  —she put the yearbook away, then pulled out her high school reveille, turning to her senior class picture and wondering why she'd even bothered to have the damn thing taken.

  Nobody had asked her for one.

  She read the small bio underneath the photograph—Drama Club, Cup and Chaucer Society, Chess Club, Homemaker s Club—then looked at her quote. Every senior had been allowed one brief quote under their photo and bio, an epitaph for their youth before they went out to die a little more every day in the great big bad real world.

  She read:

  Just be the best and truest person you can!

  Her vision blurred briefly. She wiped her eyes, then placed her hand, palm-down, on top of the photograph, embarrassed at her youthful optimism for what Might Be, now what Might Have Been.

  "Might have been," whispered Amanda, softly. How much time had she wasted with thoughts of what might have been? How many moments of her life had been sacrificed to fantasies, well-choreographed memories of tremendously exciting or romantic things that had never happened to her? For so long everything had been defined by absence: the absence of laughter, the absence of friends, the absence of the noises made by a lover trying hard not to make any noise—not only that, not only the absence of noise, but the absence of noises to come—no phone ringing (a man calling to ask her for a date), no car pulling up into the driveway (said man coming to pick her up because he was old-fashioned that way and thought it right and proper that the man do the driving), no nervous knock on the front door (because he wasn't all that well-versed in this dating thing, poor guy).

  But now...now there would be a new absence in her life; the absence of might-have-beens, because now she was beautiful, and almost didn't care if Beauty was a lie because Beauty always has her way—

  —no; she mustn't think like that. Ever again.

  Her sisters stared at her, expectant, inquisitive.

  "Don't ask me," she said to her sisters. "Don't ask me if I remember that time I got lost at a family picnic when I was five and spent three hours wandering through the woods crying. And don't ask me if I still have that picture of Bobby Sherman that I cut out of Seventeen when I was in high school because I thought a paper lover was better than no lover at all—and before you remind me, yes, I did hide in the attic on the afternoon of my thirteenth birthday party and I know Mom and Dad were worried sick, and I know I broke their hearts when I didn't like that awful record player they bought for me—it looked too much like the one Mom used—but everyone has to have their heart broken sometime in their life, don't they? And no, I never called that guy from Columbus back because I was afraid he'd reject me and I've never really handled rejection well, in spite of what I tell myself."

  Her sisters said nothing.

  She looked down at her high school photograph once more
, this time tracing the shape of her cheek with a fingertip. "God, honey," she whispered. "I'll miss you so much. But don't worry—I'll never forget anything I learned from you."

  She carried the book over to the dresser and used the business end an antique letter opener to cut out her photograph, then carefully tucked the picture into a corner of the mirror's frame.

  She examined the letter opener in her hands, admiring its sharp edges. "I remember one time when I was a little girl Dad shot a deer and split it open from its neck down to its hind legs, then hung it upside-down in the basement to drain. I didn't know it was down there. I went down to get something for Mom—I don't remember what—and it was dark and I didn't want to go down because the light switch was all the way over on the other wall, which meant that I had to walk across the basement in order to turn it on...it always seemed like a twenty-mile hike through the darkest woods to me, that walk across the basement to the light switch.

  "I went down to get—a screwdriver, that was it! Mom needed to pry the lid off some can of silver polish and needed a screwdriver. So I get to the bottom of the stairs and take a deep breath and start hiking through the forest, then I slipped in a puddle of something and fell on my stomach. I yelled because I was having trouble getting up, so Mom came down and walked over and turned on the light...

  "There was so much blood everywhere. I was so frightened I couldn't even scream. The deer's hanging there, its eyes wide, staring at me while the rest of it gushed blood and pieces of guts and I didn't know if the deer was bleeding on me or if I was bleeding on it, I wasn't even sure if the thing was dead. I reached out to Mom and tried to speak but I couldn't. I was afraid that if she didn't pull me away the light would go out again and I'd die there with the deer in the dark forest.

  “I never got myself a pet because of that. Because animals die and that meant someday I'd die too. Alone in the dark forest. Alone in the dark."

  8. Programmed For Paradise

  Her sisters surrounded her now, whispering of their awe and admiration as they caressed her—I've never seen hair as lovely as yours your eyes are so breathtaking and pure azure what I wouldn't give for a figure like yours with that stomach so flat and diamond perfect God your lips I love your lips so full and red and sensual and moist your neck so slender your arms so slim your hands so delicate your legs so exquisite your skin so luminous—

  —then she remembered the words of Old Roses, who was Shekinah and Malkuth, as well: Women shouldn't care about lies like Beauty and Ugliness and Plainness—

  —she saw that each of her shadow sisters had claimed some part of her old self—her old eyes, her old lips, nose, hands, legs, cheeks, teeth, bone structure, neck—and it took a moment for the full impact of that to register—

  —As forgettable as you think you are, there is someone out there who envies what you have; to whom you, as you are, are the ideal—

  "I don't want you to envy me," she said to her sisters.

  "Not envy," said a sister in Shekinah's voice. "Admire."

  "Why are you here?"

  "To admire, and to give thanks. I am changed."

  "I am changed," echoed the others.

  "I am more than I was."

  "I am more than I was."

  "But you always were," said Amanda. "All of you."

  “We know this. Because of you.”

  One of them placed a warm, loving hand on her bare shoulder, a touch so sensual in its silent softness that its physical pleasure transcended the merely sexual. “We understand how you feel,” said this sister, “and we love you so very, very much." She leaned forward and kissed Amanda on the lips, long and lovingly; then, with great tenderness, cupped her face in magical hands and squeezed until Amanda had no choice but to part her lips; when she did this, her nameless sister breathed into her mouth an age-old breath filled with the breath of all sisters before and yet to come. It seeped down into her core and spread through her like the first cool drink on a hot summer’s day: an ice-bird spreading chill wings that pressed against her lungs and bones until Amanda was flung wide open, dizzy and disoriented, seized by a whirling vortex and spun around, around, around in a whirl, spiraling higher, thrust into the heart of all Creation’s whirling invisibilities, a creature whose puny carbon atoms and other transient substances were suddenly freed, unbound, scattered amidst the universe—yet each particle still held strong to the immeasurable, unseen thread which linked it inexorably to her soul and her consciousness; twirling fibres of light wound themselves around impossibly fragile, molecule-thin membranes of memory and moments that swam toward her like proud children coming back to shore after their very first time in the water alone, and when they reached her, when these memories and moments emerged from the sea and reached out for her, Amanda ran toward them, arms open wide, meeting them on windswept beaches of thought, embracing them, accepting them, absorbing them, becoming Many, becoming Few, becoming One, knowing, learning, feeling; her blood mingled with their blood, her thoughts with their thoughts, dreams with dreams, hopes with hopes, frustrations with frustrations, and in this mingling, in this unity, in this actualization, she became:

  a woman, alone, nameless, any ordinary woman, and this woman enters a department store from the street, tired, hot, her hair windblown, looking very mortal, her face perhaps just a tad more visible than she would like, and in order to reach the cosmetics counter she has to pass a deliberately disorienting prism of mirrors and lights and perfume-scents which cumulatively suggest to her that she isn’t all she could be, so by the time she reached the counter she feels old and ugly, then uglier still as she looks across the counter and sees that it is staffed by ranks of angels—seraphim and cherubim—perfect young faces on perfect young bodies, backlit, ethereal, programmed for paradise, and the woman places her hand on the cool glass, looking down at heaven in a tube, in a jar, under the lid of a compact or on the tip of an eye-liner, and when she looks up to the angelic faces behind the counter, hoping for understanding, for some moment of communion, she sees a line of round, unmerciful mirrors, each reflecting her own face in all its imperfection back at her, larger and in harsher light, so flawed and shut out from the paradise on the other side of the counter;

  whirling, she became:

  two women simultaneously; one, in her late thirties, crossing the street with her face buried in a book, just like Amanda in her high school days when she walked home alone every day, but this woman looked as if she were more interested in keeping her eyes averted from the world passing by than in paying attention to the words on the page; the second woman, much shorter than the first, a good forty pounds heavier and ten years older, carried a shoulder bag filled with books, only the expression on her face—part impatience, part resignation, and part longing—betrayed that she wished she had the nerve to walk with her face buried in a book, but then what would she have to look forward to once she got home? And as they passed one another, both looked up and slowed their steps, just for a moment, because suddenly one was thinking Is that what I’ll look like in ten years? while the other thought My God, is that what I used to look like when I was that age? then the crosswalk sign changed and both, Before and After, hurried along, shaken, rushing along to the same plans in the same kind of house where each had lived similar evenings for longer than either wanted to admit;

  spiraling, she became:

  a woman named Rosemary, married for twenty-two years to a man she knew had been having an affair with a much younger and prettier woman for at least a year, probably longer, so this Rosemary found herself sitting, nervous, in the waiting room of a plastic surgeon’s office where she planned to have a little liposuction, a bit of a face-lift, and perhaps, if she could afford it, a little breast augmentation, some Inflate-a-Boob so maybe he’d take notice of her once again;

  spinning, she became:

  a patchwork quilt of wrinkles and cuts and swollen bruises that was once Joyce’s face, and Joyce carefully, with trembling hands, washed away the blood, wincing, her b
oyfriend’s words, so much more violent than his fists, replaying in her mind: “Why aren’t you beautiful? You’re not even pretty!” and she wept because she knew it was true, she wasn’t pretty and really, really wished she were, because then Kevin wouldn’t be ashamed to be seen with her, and maybe she ought to break it off with him but who else would have her? Maybe getting hit once in a while after he’d had a few too many was the price she had to pay for not being lonely in bed at night;

  mingling, she became:

  the secret, embarrassed fantasy of so many plain-faced ones: Changed into a very beautiful and glamourous woman, closing their eyes and watching this other beautiful woman who used to be them from another place outside of themselves, seeing her so clearly, so vividly, and trying hard not to shout, “Enjoy it! Enjoy it while you can, you deserve it!” all the time knowing this other woman isn’t them, not really, it was only a silly schoolgirl fantasy;

  accepting, she became:

  the echo of voices, chanting: “It isn’t me...not myself...not this body of mine, not this fat/sagging/shapeless/old/nothing-special body...it’s her, a someone else...and that face!...a face to die for, not like this one, so ordinary, forgettable...removed from me...from fantasy...a beautiful woman...and I hate myself for feeling this way...not me...not myself...her...someone else...hate myself for feeling this way...why am I nothing if not thin/beautiful/young/without a man?...but, still...

  ...still I shout...

  ...enjoy it...

  ...enjoy it while you can...

  ...enjoy it while you can you deserve it...

  ...still...”

  lost and lonely, Amanda felt herself being wrenched backward, down through the ages, through the infinite allness of want and desire and isolation and dreams and shames and moments of pride and self-worth and meaning that Woman had shrunk Herself into so as to be human, raw with pain yet drenched in wonder, and she stretched herself under the weight of this knowing, her eyes staring toward the truth that was her soul, her whole body becoming involved in drawing it back into her in one breath, and in the moment before she came away whole, clean, and filled with glory, in the millisecond before she found herself once again standing in her bathroom staring at the reflection in the mirror, in that brief instant of eternity that revealed itself to her just this once before her final metamorphosis took place, she broke into a language few could understand, speaking of herself and her sisters as zealots entering a church resurrected on the sight of pagan temples called Beauty and Ugliness and Plainness, a novice in the inner sanctum, knowing at whose altar she knelt, to what god she prayed, and in this communion between herself and her sisters she knew all of Woman, and loved them, and thanked them as a thread of knowledge wound itself around a certain part of her consciousness and Shekinah whispered a last answer to a final question—