Rainey Royal

by Dylan Landis

  “The gun’s real,” says the man. “Shut up, Estelle.” Rainey has no idea what wuthering means, but she thinks he must have that kind of face: brooding and gorgeous, from some dreamy old novel.

  “Yeah, shut up, Estelle.” Tina sounds like she does in the girls’ room but with an undertow of fear. She says, “You guys live here or what?” Rainey feels the approaching moment thundering right up to her. She feels like someone who can take any kind of joke, now. She can’t wait to find out what her job will be.

  The man and the woman say no and yes at the exact same moment. “Take our wallets,” says the man. “You don’t have to hurt anyone.”

  “Be nice,” says Tina. “Invite us up.”

  “If you’re going to do anything, do it here,” says the man. Estelle’s hand remains plastered to her mouth.

  Rainey feels ravenous for what is about to happen. The sidewalk is pushing through her shoes now. “I’m feeling kind of antsy down here,” she says in a voice that sounds like smoke and jazz. She has it down. “Take us upstairs, baby,” she tells the man.

  Tina walks up to the stoop and jabs the gun against Estelle’s knee. Saint Tina of the Girls’ Room—are they really in the same place, doing the same thing? Is it possible that Tina feels purification as she does this bad act? Rainey’s father’s words unspool from her body as if she is expelling a magician’s silk scarf: They talk about this at school, don’t they? How girls your age are growing into their sexual powers? She feels the nape of her neck sealing itself against Gordy’s hand, and she looks at Estelle’s neck with rising irritation.

  “Okay okay okay okay okay,” says Estelle, and gets up fast from the stoop.

  “Hey, listen,” says Rainey, batting Tina on the arm. She almost says her name but catches herself. “I totally believe you. I do. I had one crazy moment of doubt, but it’s over. I’m sorry.” She waits while Tina closely scans her face as if she’s not sure she’s seen it before.

  “You still think I’m bullshitting,” says Tina, locking her gaze back onto the boyfriend and Estelle. “And you’re still mad from what I said about Gordy.”

  Rainey is not afraid of Tina. She might be afraid of hurting Tina, though.

  “I believe you to death,” says Rainey. “And it’s okay about Gordy. Come on. I’ll prove it. Let’s do something crazy.”

  “Oh my God,” says Estelle. “Oh God oh God oh God.”

  THE BRICK BUILDING’S ENTRY hall is lit with bare bulbs, and its stairs are thickly carpeted. Glossy black doors, greenish walls—Rainey feels like she is at the bottom of a fish tank. “Go,” says Tina harshly, and the man looks at her jamming her purse, with the gun half in it, into Estelle’s back. “Don’t touch her,” he says, and immediately starts up the stairs. Rainey listens for sounds from other tenants and hears none. “I’m aiming right at Estelle’s spine,” says Tina, and while it seems to Rainey that the man could lunge back down the stairs at them, it also seems that the word spine sounds menacingly like bone porcelain, and she is not afraid.

  They climb, first him, then Estelle and Tina in a kind of lockstep, then Rainey, the shag carpeting hushing their progress, till the man stops at a door on the third floor and Estelle sags against it. She says, “You don’t have to come in. You could turn around. We’ll give you everything.”

  Tina holds the gun close to her own side, aimed at Estelle. “Oh, we can’t wait to see your apartment,” she says in a pretend-guest voice.

  Rainey holds her hand out for both sets of keys; she senses Estelle and the boyfriend trying not to touch her palm. It makes her powers grow, holding their keys and key chains: such intimate objects. She opens the shiny black door, feels for a switch, and turns on the light.

  “You’re not kidding we want to see it,” she says.

  The apartment, a large studio with two tall windows, is painted a deep violet, as if an intense twilight has settled. In contrast, the trim and furnishings—a bureau, a table with chairs, and a curvaceous bed frame—are painted bridal white. Rainey can’t believe it. She walks down a violet hall into which a Pullman kitchen is notched, flicking on lights as she goes. At the end, she opens the door to a violet bath. She wants to steal all the walls.

  Behind her, she hears Tina telling the boyfriend and Estelle to sit on the bed, and how far apart.

  “What color is this?” she calls from the bathroom, where the white shower curtain manages to look like a wedding gown against the violet walls.

  “I mixed it.” Estelle is hyperventilating; she can hear it. “I’m a set designer.”

  Rainey walks back down the hall and props herself against a white dining chair. Tina moves cautiously around the room, always watching Estelle and the boyfriend, lifting small objects off the bureau and nightstands and amassing a little pile of goods on the hearth. Rolls of coins. Bracelets. The gun never wavers. Rainey asks Estelle, “Yeah, but what do you call it, this color?”

  “Amethyst,” says Estelle. “It’s a glaze.”

  “It’s incredible,” says Rainey. “It’s the most beautiful color I’ve ever seen.”

  Estelle hugs herself and shivers. “Please point that somewhere else,” she asks Tina. “I swear I won’t do anything.”

  “God, I love this place,” says Rainey. “Would you light me a cigarette? And may I have your cape, please?”

  RAINEY WATCHES TINA COLLECT sixty-three dollars from the two wallets tossed on the table and a fistful of silver earrings from a bureau drawer. It takes only a minute. Tina never stops watching Estelle and the boyfriend. She jams her prizes into the pocket of the boyfriend’s leather jacket, which she is now wearing. Then she positions herself by the white marble hearth. Estelle and the boyfriend are not playing at being robbed. They sit on the edge of the bed about as far apart as they can while still holding hands—the holding hands was Tina’s concession.

  Glancing at Tina, Rainey catches sight of herself in the mirror over the hearth, luxuriant hair spilling out the back of the tie-dye scarf. “Look at us.” She gives Tina a light nudge. “Even with all this shit on, we’re still cute. We should take a Polaroid. You got a Polaroid, Estelle?”

  Tina keeps the gun aimed straight at Estelle as she turns quickly to look at herself in the mirror, then at Rainey. Her shoulders slump a little. She looks back at Estelle but says, “How can you tell it’s still us?”

  Rainey laughs. “You’re tripping, right?” Tina shrugs. They both know she hasn’t tried acid yet. “ ’Cause it looks like us,” says Rainey. “Right?”

  “I’m not sure,” says Tina.

  “You’re on blotter,” says Rainey, and waits for her to stop being spooky. Rainey once licked blotter off Gordy’s palm and spent hours watching the walls quilt themselves exquisitely, kaleidoscopically. “Who else would you think I am.” says Rainey. “Jimi Hendrix?”

  “I know what Jimi Hendrix looks like. Don’t move,” Tina snaps at the boyfriend, who is edging closer to Estelle. “I am tripping,” she says. “I don’t recognize myself.”

  Rainey isn’t sure she recognizes this Tina either, the one who sees a stranger in her own face. “Ever?”

  “That would be retarded. I mean, with the scarf on.”

  It’s Rainey’s turn to nosy around, as her father would say. She takes her time. Tina’s weirding her out. The nightstand clock says they’ve been there four minutes. Surely they can stay another four. In the silence she can hear the clock whir. The cape hangs heavy from her shoulders; it is too hot for the apartment, but the weight feels terrific.

  On a closet shelf she finds a stack of typed and handwritten letters rubber-banded in red. She takes it down and sets it aside on the bureau. “You don’t want that,” says Estelle, half rising. “It’s old, it’s junk—”

  “I don’t always recognize people on TV, either,” says Tina. “Or at school. You think there’s something wrong with me?”

  “Yes.” Rainey goes back to the hallway Pullman kitchen for a pair of shears.

  “Well, then fuck you,” call
s Tina.

  “But there’s plenty of shit wrong with me, too,” says Rainey, walking back in with the scissors.

  She snips buttons from Estelle’s blouses, lace and beadwork from a vintage sweater, ribbons from a nightgown. She puts these on the bureau with the letters. “In winter?” says Tina. “When you put a hat on? I’m not a hundred percent sure it’s you till you say something.” She takes a deep breath and locks it up somewhere for a while. “At least I always know my grandmother.” She smiles; it’s a private, knowing smile. Rainey could almost swear there’s pride in it.

  She bites her lip. She prowls the room more aggressively. She finds two photo albums at the foot of the hearth and begins robbing them of photographs. “Not my father,” says Estelle, and starts to cry. “Not my grandmother.”

  “Who is this?” Rainey holds up a square color photo of a woman pretending to vamp in a one-piece bathing suit. The woman’s smile is playful, as if she is somebody’s mother who would never really, actually vamp. Mothers interest Rainey: their presence, their absence, the way they react to the heat waves her body gives off near their husbands and sons.

  “No one,” says Estelle.

  Rainey adds it to the stack. Estelle makes a keening sound in her throat. Rainey, moving on, seizes two black journals from a nightstand drawer.

  “Oh my God, no,” says Estelle, but then she looks at Tina and the gun and closes her eyes.

  Rainey turns abruptly to face Tina. “Look,” she says, “if you ever don’t know who someone is, just ask me, okay?”

  “Do you think I’m crazy?”

  “Just ask me.”

  “Are we okay?”

  Rainey sighs like of course they’re okay, but she still hears it. He gets into your room every night.

  “Do you think I have schizophrenia?”

  “Just ask me,” Rainey says.

  She goes down the hall again, cape flapping behind her; she salvages a grocery bag from under the sink, unclips the receiver from the hallway wall phone, and drops that in first. Then she drops in the letters, the cuttings, the photos, and the journals that she has piled on the bureau. The door lock, miraculously, requires a key on each side. She and Tina can actually lock these people in.

  “Who’s the woman in the photo?” demands Rainey.

  Estelle, crying, shakes her head.

  “Take my watch,” the boyfriend tells Tina. “Leave her papers and take my watch. You’ll get fifty dollars for it, I swear.”

  “Thanks,” says Tina, as if startled by his generosity. She makes him give it to Estelle, who holds it out, shrinking from the gun.

  “The papers?” he says. Rainey sees Tina admiring the watch, and she slips into a vision. She sees a tapestry made from scraps of handwriting and snippets of photos, tiny telegrams from the heart: patches of letters, strips of confessions, grainy faces of people who have, in one way or another, perhaps like her mother, split. She’ll sew buttons at the intersections, layer in some lace. In Rainey’s hands, such things will reassemble themselves into patterns as complex as snowflakes. She will start the tapestry tonight, in her pink room. What would Estelle do with this ephemera anyway, besides keep it closeted away?

  “You have Paul’s watch,” whispers Estelle. “Can I have my papers?”

  “Oh, it’s Paul?” Rainey looks at the boyfriend. “I don’t have Paul’s watch.” She doesn’t, in fact, have a watch at all; she is waiting for her father to give up his. She swirls the cape and turns theatrically to Tina, who appears delicate in the leather jacket. “You have the watch, right?” Rainey sighs dramatically and runs her hands over the cape down the curves of her body, staring at Paul, who looks back at her with the directness of someone who respects the gun too much to move but is not exactly afraid. This intrigues Rainey tremendously.

  “I thought Paul would like me better, but she got the watch, so apparently not.” She’s just playing, but it seems to her that Tina looks at her sharply. “Listen,” she says to Tina, “let’s go. I’m great. I have every single thing I need.”

  She is surprised to see hurt flash across Tina’s eyes.

  “You’re great?” says Tina. “Why are you great? What’ve you got that you need?”

  Paul sits forward.

  “Shut up,” says Tina, though he hasn’t said anything.

  “Don’t,” says Rainey. She is holding her grocery bag with one arm and has a hand on the doorknob. “I said I believe you. Let’s go.” But Tina remains plastered to the hearth.

  “What’ve you got that you need?” says Tina. When Rainey doesn’t answer, she says, “What? You’ve got an albino freak who—” She stops, possibly because Rainey is staring her down, possibly out of restraint.

  “An albino freak who what?” mutters Paul.

  Rainey looks at Tina, flaming against the amethyst walls, radiant in her distress. She feels the gaze of Paul upon her. “I have everything I need from this apartment,” she says, as if talking to someone from a distant land.

  “Oh.” Tina visibly relaxes, as if warm water were being poured through her. “I don’t.” She turns a slow, thoughtful quarter circle, looking around the room.

  “Oh no,” says Estelle. “Please go. Please please please go.”

  “Get those scissors, would you?” says Tina, taking a step toward Estelle.

  Rainey picks them up off the nightstand, where she’d set them down after taking souvenir snippets from Estelle’s clothes, and swings them from one finger. “What are you going to do, cut her hair?”

  Tina smiles. “No, you are.”

  “Really? Seriously”—again she almost says Tina’s name—“what are you planning to do with her hair?”

  “Same thing I was going to do without it,” says Tina.

  Estelle lets go of Paul’s hand and clamps both her hands around her hair. “For Christ’s sake,” says Paul.

  Rainey wonders if the gun belongs to Tina now. Estelle’s hair belongs to Estelle; that much is true. “No,” she says. “This is between me and you.”

  “You said everything was okay,” Tina says. “You said you believed me. You said, ‘I’ll prove it.’ ”

  “I think she’s proven quite a bit,” says Paul.

  “Whose boyfriend are you? Be quiet,” says Tina, still pointing the gun at Estelle.

  Rainey sets the grocery bag on the floor and puts her face in the bowl of her hands, scissors still dangling, so she can think. Tina is telling the truth now. It’s Rainey who’s lying: she does not believe a word about the grandmother, and things are not okay. She looks through her fingers from Estelle, who has wrapped her long hair protectively around her fist, to Tina, who waits to see if trust can be restored.

  She almost asks again about the woman in the picture. It’s the right moment: she holds the scissors, and Tina holds the gun. Instead she takes a deep breath of amethyst air. “Forgive me,” she says, and for a moment, while neither Tina nor Estelle knows whose forgiveness she requires, she feels nearly free.

  “Here,” says Rainey. She bends over quickly, so the tie-dye scarf falls forward and the violet room swings back, grabs a thick sheaf of her own long, dark hair, and cuts.

  CLARINET

  “Say it,” says Rainey. She lounges against a steel countertop, scarred and waxy dissection trays lined up behind her. “I ride the bus. Say it.”

  Lunchtime: the science lab at Urban Day School is deserted. Tina, glowing with menace, blocks the door. We’re the lionesses, Rainey thinks.

  Leah Levinson is the giraffe. She stands locked by fear behind Miss Brennan’s desk. Taxi horns filter through the windows. Rainey stares with arms crossed, daring Leah to look up and escalate things.

  The girl appears to be counting floor tiles. She would be so easy to fix, Rainey thinks. Her hair French-braided, some coppery eye shadow to bring out her green eyes. Tighter jeans—Rainey could stitch them. She would teach Leah to dance. She and Tina could make it a project.

  Then Rainey could decide if Leah was an acolyte or a frie
nd.

  “She doesn’t know what the bus is.” Tina drops into a plié. Everyone knows what the bus is; it’s for crippled kids and poor kids who get into schools in better neighborhoods. At least this is how the insult goes.

  “Say I ride the bus,” says Rainey, “or I’ll soak you.” She lifts a beaker off a shelf and moves toward the sink. If Leah gets wet she’ll panic and change into her gym shirt. Whereas if Rainey had the wet top, she’d laugh with fake mortification at her Sophia Loren bust. That’s what her father calls it, her Sophia Loren bust, except he uses a different word.

  “All right, now you have to say I want to give Andy Sak a rim job.” She and Tina exchange a glance. For days they have marveled at this whirring phrase that sounds half mechanical and half obscene. Rim, lid, edges, jars—maybe it has something to do with nipples, Rainey thinks. Or maybe it is a bluff or a misunderstanding.

  “Okay, Rain, do it,” Tina says.

  Rainey sets the beaker in the sink, turns on the tap, and grabs a bottle of formaldehyde. “Guess which.” She blocks Leah’s view as she pretends to pour.

  “I ride the bus.” Leah crosses her hands over her chest and watches warily as Rainey approaches with the brimming beaker.

  Rainey gives Leah the sweet, sorrowful smile she might give a small child who’s resisting bedtime. She feels in herself the power to make Leah trust her, to maybe drink from the beaker. Her father has acolytes—it might be cool to have one of her own.

  “I ride the bus,” says Leah. “Let me out, okay?”

  “Too late,” says Tina, “you were supposed to say about the rim job,” and Rainey, the word rim humming in her brain, approaches the girl sidling along the wall.

  THIS IS NEW, AND Rainey hates it: Tina has just two hours after school, and her grandmother believes those hours are for Bible study. Rainey has gone from agnostic to atheist when it comes to believing in the unseen grandmother. Tina’s real family must be drunk, mean, or naked. Don’t hide it, Rainey wants to tell her—who wants to be best friends with some normal-family chick?