“What are you talking about, Jonah?”
“I think you mean who. By the way, what happened to your hair?”
“My hair is none of your business. Tell me you’re not skipping pills. Didn’t the doctor tell you about the pills? How you needed to keep taking them?”
“Why would I take pills that stop me from seeing things as they really are?”
“Tell me about your life, about the friends you’re making,” I say, desperate to change the subject.
“Friends? I never figured you one for banalities. Should we make small talk then? Talk about the weather, the book I just read, or the five-year-old girl that was fucked in India and forced to marry her rapist? No, I thought we’d talk about you. About the friend you’ve made.”
The way Jonah says friend.
And then: “About the car he drives, that house he lives in with that dead wife and the daughter in the window. Never thought you’d be a woman who goes in for stucco. I used to like to watch her sometimes—the daughter, not the wife. Although I suppose I could go visit her if I knew where she was buried. Mainly, I wonder how the story about my sister, and the man who sleeps on top of her sheets instead of between them, will play out.”
“She wasn’t buried, she was burned,” I say. “Quit playing Nancy Drew. It doesn’t suit you. Remember, you live in New York.”
“You brought me back, dear sister, remember? They say after your body is cremated, they grind the remains of you. Imagine a body in a blender,” Jonah says. “But I’ll tell you about Lionel. He’s smart. He’s been teaching me about evil. How to find it, carve it out, and make the necessary calibrations and corrections.” Jonah talks in a way that’s foreign, in a voice that doesn’t belong to my brother. Or possibly this was him all along.
“Jonah, you’re scaring me.”
“Have you met her?” Jonah says. He’s lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling.
“Met who?”
“Kate. She’s a piece of work, that one. Sometimes I follow her to the ravine just to see her stare at the rocks.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the sad girl who still watches you sleep. By the way, why haven’t you gone to the police? Press charges.”
“I want to be a person who turns over leaves.”
“News flash: leaves look the same on both sides.”
Jonah’s room is blue. He needs it that way, clean. Jonah rents a building under construction, a building still being renovated, and his room was once a laboratory where doctors in the business of elimination would perform procedures on rich pregnant women. Floor painted black, walls the color of certain skies—he needs space to move because he’s become dormant, like barnacles affixed to the undersides of large ships and fat whales. He’s become attached to pain, so much so that Lionel has to put the shake in him, has to shove him in front of the mirror so Jonah can see the barnacles. They cover his face. There’s no way to get clean. “They know their own kind,” Lionel says, handing him a knife. “Get to scraping,” Lionel urges. “There’s no way of getting clean otherwise.” His words are a blinding sunrise Jonah doesn’t want to see, a note held for too long (needle lifted, placed back on the record, again, again) to a point where the music becomes unbearable. Jonah’s face hurts, feels smothered, this is why he needs the blue. The river will loosen the grip and cool him down.
“Through me you go into a city of weeping; through me you go into eternal pain; through me you go among the lost people,” says Lionel, whispering in Jonah’s ear like resuscitation.
“I don’t need your CPR,” Jonah says. “And I don’t need you to clean up my mess. I need my sister back.”
“You keep holding on to that,” Lionel laughs.
A head lifts, a word holds and plays out the scene, looks for places to hide but there are none. And the cold, “No.” The word is a note folded into itself, a wave carrying his voice out into the ocean, and he finds himself grabbing for a mouthful of air, wants to shut Lionel the fuck up (“Dude, can you just quit the shit?”), but there’s no quitting of the shit. There is only Lionel, whose voice, with the passage of each day, only seems to get louder.
Behind him, Lionel breathes down his neck and whispers, “We need to talk about your sister. We need to talk about what should be done with her.”
“What should be done with her?” Jonah says.
“I think you know.”
WHEN JONAH WAS twelve, he was tall, angular, but soft, the sort of boy who didn’t shoot guns like the rest of them. He kept close to our mother, hid behind the folds of her dresses, and our father hated him for it. Hated that his son was allowed access to his wife’s heart, permitted to touch the skin underneath her clothes. Once Jonah was in the picture, Mother swatted our father away.
When our father arrived home from a village that cartographers failed to diagram, raw from a deal that fell through—a botched investment that would require us to move to a garden apartment, hock all the finery, and use the old dishes with the flowers rubbed off—he was drunk on gin and sore beneath his clothes from a disagreement regarding the failed deal. Later, Mother affixed ice packs to blankets to wrap around his thighs and shins, which had swollen and bruised black. Later, they packed the whole of our lives into boxes they stole from the supermarket. Later, Mother shrilled at her husband, “You are lesser than.” Mother’s fury gave her the kind of temporary apoplexy that prevented her from completing sentences, but her fragments and half thoughts were just as ruinous.
But in his room at that particular moment were just Jonah, age twelve, and our father’s anger.
I also remember blood, my own, how it soaked through my pants and stained the sheets. I spent two days each month in the bathroom, and on that Saturday I heard our father stomp up the stairs and reprimand Jonah for something that we won’t remember.
A scuffle, chairs knocked over, and a succession of screams. Father bolted, fled into the street. I found Jonah on the floor, one blue eye bleeding. I pried open his fist to find a pair of tweezers, wet with blood. Smiling he said, “I tried to be good, but being good does you no good so what else is there?”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I didn’t like how he kicked open my door like that. I didn’t like his tone. So I taught him manners. It’s sad when you have to teach adults things they should already know.”
We ran to the car. How hard could it be to drive, I thought. Shove the key into the ignition, hit the gas pedal, and steer the wheel. I was fifteen, swerving a car down the street.
The road shows us how close to the edge we are.
Jonah stared out the car window, seeing through it, beyond it, to the houses down the drive. “You know what I did, but we can pretend if that’s how you want to play it.”
“Jonah, what did you do?”
“I don’t like mittens, or people who wear them. That poor thumb is left to fend for itself, while all the other fingers point and laugh.”
“Tell me what you did with the tweezers.”
“You saw. Lionel cut things,” Jonah said. “He told me to sleep. Told me he was going to play doctor and Dad’s role was the victim. So I went to sleep. Where are we going?”
“We’re running away.”
“You’re driving. I’m sitting. No one’s running.”
“We can’t talk about Lionel. You know the rules.”
“Yes, sir,” Jonah said. “Let’s play a game.”
“What kind of game?”
“To play it, we’ll need the tree.”
His hand jerked the wheel. My foot pumped the gas instead of the brake. The smell of steel and smoke perfumed. Glass raked through our hair. His collarbone shattered. My knees were scraped and battered.
At the hospital, Mother hissed at me, “What were you thinking? What did you do?”
“I’m bleeding,” I said.
“You’re good for nothing,” she said, but she was already gone, scurrying away with her little address b
ook to the pay phone.
“Don’t listen to her,” my father said. “Your mother’s trying to calm down after the thought of losing you kids.”
“How? By acting like an asshole?”
Father walked like a man past his prime, already put out to pasture; a man who knew that his wife changed the sheets on their bed before he pulled into the driveway because he couldn’t bear the thought of sleeping on something used. Once I overheard him say to Mother, “Keep it clean and quiet.” To which she responded, “What kind of woman do you take me for? I’ve been clean; it’s been quiet.”
All those years, Mother gave him the gift of clean sheets.
Even in the waiting room, with its air conditioning and too-bright lights, they could feel the heat. The hot wind came down from the desert, determined to scorch the earth clean. Twenty days a year they suffered the kind of heat that made sane men wild, rabid, prone to killing garden snakes and black rabbits with machetes. The kind of heat that made women push their husbands out of moving cars while their newborns were strapped in the back seat. Teenagers jumped off the tallest buildings they could find, but only ended up cracking ribs and breaking a few bones. The streets stunk of carrion, cigarette smoke, and bad luck.
Mother stood against a pay phone, loading it up with change, punching the keys, and wailing into the receiver at whoever was on the other side. When I approached her, placed a nervous hand on her shoulder, she whirled around and hissed, “You just couldn’t keep it together, could you? Always have to be the star of your own show.”
My lip trembled. I fought back tears. And then I saw my father watching us. Pity washed across his face and I momentarily hated him for the luxury of being loved more than me. “It must hurt to have another man in your house. Fucking Mom. On your bed,” I said. Men in our town were buying up real estate in Mother’s heart and only two could fit—the man on current rotation in her bed and Jonah, asleep by her knee. The rest were the remains: renters who dared to shove their way in if there was a vacancy. I was fifteen and I knew this. Our father was thirty-eight and still thinking he had a claim by way of a marriage certificate, but that wasn’t a deed and no one told him the rules of the game or how it was played. He withdrew, maybe realizing the graft of love he tried to stick wouldn’t take. He was molting, and the one person he loved didn’t care.
“Why would you do that? What have I ever done to hurt you?” he said.
Jonah shook his head. “You got it all wrong. It was Lionel.”
CITY OF GIRLS
1990–1991
AFTER THE TWEEZERS incident, I was sent away to a boarding school where I subsisted on rice cakes and cocaine. “Everyone’s got it figured out but you, Gillian,” Alice said, as I left my bags unpacked. Lying in bed, my roommate wore a pink sombrero and a T-shirt that read, “Chick Buffet: All You Can Fuck.” The room smelled of the clove cigarettes Alice smoked.
Surveying the Guns N’ Roses and Linda Evangelista posters tacked onto the walls, the flannels and tight T-shirts balled up by the door, the oatmeal packets and empty Cup O’ Noodles cartons littering the floor underneath Alice’s bed, I considered calling my parents collect, asking what in the fuck had I done to deserve this. I mean, seriously. I wasn’t the one who got creative with the tweezers, took the wheel, and slammed into a tree.
“This is temporary,” I said, regarding the one lone sweater I’d begrudgingly hung in the closet. “I’ll be home in a few weeks. They just need time to chill out.”
“Can I be honest with you? Your parents aren’t coming back. They never come back. This is last call, last exit, and no Kodak reunion is in sight. Welcome to Hotel California. They check you in and you can never leave,” Alice said, pinching her smoke with her thumb and forefinger, turning up the volume to Radiohead’s “Where I End and You Begin.” “This is the part where you accept the reality of the situation. So I suggest you unpack your bags before I decide what I really need is your half of the closet.”
Before I knew it, it was twilight and then dawn. After two weeks of answering machines and unreturned calls, I quietly folded sweaters into drawers and hung shirts and dresses in the closet.
“Welcome to the jungle,” Alice whispered from under the covers.
“How do we undo the horrors of our history?” Mr. Pratt scrawled on the chalkboard. We had just spent two hours watching The Pawnbroker, a film about a man haunted by the concentration camps of decades past. I’d seen films on public television, uniformed men dragging bodies from the gas showers, tossing them into open pits, and setting them aflame. Even after death the Jews were a petrified frieze of suffering with their gaped mouths and eyes bulging and wide. The way their brittle bones broke; their legs rotted to tree stumps. They knew they would suffer because they were Jews, but never like this. No one had ever imagined this: an end that is the smell of sweet gas.
When Mr. Pratt flipped on the lights and removed the tape from the VCR, I could still see hundreds of erect hands reaching over a barricade and how the uniformed men with their hard consonants, barking, growling from the other side, removed gold rings from fingers. Removed glasses from faces. Drilled out silver from the insides of teeth. The iron chill of Germanic typewriters, of metal striking paper, and the ledgers accounting for the accumulation of hair and teeth in a bold, elegant cursive—yet I only came undone when I saw the removal of rings. My face reworked itself so that it caved inward, a series of dots converging into a singular, small blackness.
“The Nazis were people who believed that the annihilation of the Jews would cleanse the earth. In the Final Solution, the world would finally be pure,” Mr. Pratt said.
Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.
I felt my hand rise, heard my voice say, “If we think about purity in terms of color, we think of white, which is essentially all color—all people equal along the spectrum. Then we consider black, the absence of color, a single person on a spectrum, so I wonder, Mr. Pratt, how would the Germans think that all this death would get them pure?”
Everyone turned and stared at me like they always stared. Alice laughed, aimed a balled-up wad of loose-leaf paper at the back of my head. “What the fuck are you talking about?” she said.
“Settle down, Socrates,” someone said.
“Class.” Mr. Pratt sighed.
“What are you going to do to us, Mr. Pratt? Ship us off to prison?” Alice said. “News flash, we’re already there.”
“Yes, Alice. Only you would think that a boarding school that costs $8,000 a year is a prison.”
Melanie Clegg raised her hand. “I don’t understand why the Jews didn’t fight back. There were, like, millions of them. They could’ve totally taken the Nazis. Wasn’t Hitler a coke addict with Parkinson’s? Hardly scary.”
“You’re a fucking moron,” Kevin Flynn said. “Stick to what you know best. Blow jobs and Benetton.”
“Bitches be trippin’,” Simon Marx said.
“Stop acting like you’re black. Your dad builds malls in Long Island.”
“My great uncle was Native American, which is practically black. And who says a black man can’t build a mall? That’s straight up oppression right there.”
“Sometimes your generation makes me want to shoot myself,” Mr. Pratt said.
“That really hot guy in Dead Poets Society shot himself in the head.”
“Ethan Hawke was certifiable in that movie,” Melanie said.
“Are we having a quiz on this? Because I fell asleep during the movie.”
I heaved, closed my eyes. I imagined a man going about his day buying and selling junk to people, and all he can think about is a hand punching through glass and reaching for his wife. All he can see is the gold ring removed from her finger. He curses to himself in Yiddish, furious that he can’t erase the German language. He feels the burden of the compound words on his tongue. He wasn’t a Jew; he was a Juden. Judas.
In the hallway after class, the girls planned their weekly 90210 vi
ewing party. Someone smuggled in booze and smokes, and everyone was freaking out over the fact that the Walsh family might move back to Minnesota. Everyone agreed that this episode was pivotal. What would become of Dylan and Brenda if the cruel world put geography between the Romeo and Juliet of our time?
Who gives a fuck about some rich kids in the West when there are massacres, fucking holocausts, in the East played out in Technicolor?
Alice’s mother was called Lullaby, Lulu for short, and she was the kind of woman men passed around. She wore suede fringe and tight leather—dead animals were her camouflage—and imparted boarding school survival tactics like she was one of us. Only swallow after a boy buys you dinner at the best restaurants four times in a row. Don’t you dare eat the food, not one bite. Just order the courses and let the meal go cold. Lulu sustained herself through multiple divorces, trading up rock stars for biotech millionaires. She lived off the remains of other people.
Regarding me she said, “Watch out for this one. Gillian’s the sentimental type. She’s the kind of girl who would give it all away for free if a boy asked her to. Pluck out her heart, if she had to. Alice, you have to teach her the rules.”
Alice dragged a paddle brush through her hair.
“I’m right here, you know,” I said.
Through a face full of smoke, Lulu said, “Let me guess, you’ve spent your whole life waiting for your mother’s love. Not having a mother’s love makes you do crazy things like fuck boys in basements without rubbers and take drugs sold on the street.”
“We don’t buy drugs off the street, Mother.” Alice rolled her eyes. “We have pager numbers, connections.”
“You don’t know anything about my mother,” I snapped.
“Oh, honey. You got desperate for love written all over your face.”
“Never love so much it makes you vulnerable. Never cry. If you hurt, never let them see you bleed. Cover the bruises with powder. Always say no, especially if you mean yes.” Alice announced her mother’s rules in singsong.
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