Donna Has Left the Building

by Susan Jane Gilman

  I began to envision meeting Patti Smith so clearly, I could taste it like the salt off the Atlantic. Her house would be a sleepy little clapboard bungalow alone on the edge of the sand just beyond the boardwalk. She’d be sitting out on her porch, bare feet propped up on the railing, an acoustic guitar in her lap—practically waiting for me.

  Yet on the main strip of Rockaway Beach I was surprised to see concrete high-rises towered above the Atlantic. Aluminum-sided row houses sat crammed together between telegraph poles. Slowing down, I squinted out the window. Shouldn’t there be signs posted for rock ’n’ roll landmarks? Where, exactly, were the bungalows? A driver behind me leaned on his horn. “Hey Michigan,” he shouted out his window. “Stop taking your car for a goddamn walk.”

  I pulled up beside a group of construction workers repairing a garage.

  “Excuse me.” I rolled down my window. “Would any of you guys know where Patti Smith’s house is?”

  A look of amusement ping-ponged between them.

  “Patti who?” one of them said not to me, but the others. “Why’s she asking me? Do I look like fuckin’ Google?”

  More cars started honking behind me. “Hey asshole. That light’s not gonna get any greener!” I turned the wrong way down a one-way street, then up onto a curb, nearly hitting a guy on a bike. “The fuck you doing?” he shouted.

  “Good God, Aggie.” I stopped abruptly.

  What the fuck was I doing? If I did find Patti Smith, did I really think that, instead of calling the cops, she’d actually put her arm around me—and invite me inside—and say in a warm, sisterly fashion, “Well, Donna Koczynski, my fellow musician who’s come all the way from Michigan. You’re obviously a kindred spirit in need of marital advice, so please, have tea with me, and then we’ll read aloud from Baudelaire together”?

  Miserably, I put the Subaru into reverse and tried to backtrack my way through the crowded streets. But I was a lab rat now caught in a maze. Lurching to a stop again, I leaned my head back and let loose a lone, dry sob. It was finished. I was all out of ideas. I wondered if I should find a police station somewhere, turn myself in. I was just about to roll down the window to ask for directions when I saw, winking in a storefront, a blue neon outline of a hand. Above it, in tomato-red letters, flickered two words: PALM READER.

  There it was. There was no more denying it now. In fact, it was so glaringly obvious—so literally a sign—I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me sooner—or why I’d been resisting it for so long. She alone might hold the key as to how to fix my fractured, idiotic life. Of course. She’d seen it already, in fact. Immediately, before I did anything else stupid or destructive or insane, I had one last lifeline to try—one last person to call—right there in New York.

  Inside the Laundromat rows of washers and dryers rotated like gears. A Hispanic man sat reading the New York Post beneath a sign that stated NO DYING ALLOWED, which struck me as oddly reassuring. Bolted to the wall by a vending machine was the only working pay phone for miles.

  It had been years since I’d used one; the receiver felt unnaturally heavy in my hand. Raising it to my ear, I paused. There was someone else I had to call first, even though I was loath to do it.

  However, I had no doubt that the police were pacing our living room by now, studying framed photos of me on the mantelpiece, asking Joey if I’d been acting strangely beforehand and jotting down what I’d been wearing when I first disappeared. (Good God, would he actually tell them? I could picture him hemming and hawing.) Austin would be hunched over on the couch clutching his stomach, rocking slightly, trying to appear indifferent. But I knew my son. Despite his carefully curated swagger and hair, some mornings before a chemistry test he’d dash into the bathroom, filling it with a gastric stench. Once, I found him in a fetal position on the bath mat. Now, he and Joey would’ve spent a night tortured by sleeplessness, imagining worst-case scenarios, frantically calling our friends, local hospitals—perhaps even morgues?

  As I fed my handful of quarters into the metal slot, my heart punched.

  My plan was, as soon as Joey answered, to say simply, “Hi. I’m alive and well and sober, so don’t worry,” then hang up. That would suffice.

  Yet a different, croakier voice answered. “Uh, hello?”

  “Austin?”

  “Yuh huh,” it came plaintively. “Mom?”

  My kid. My kid was actually answering a phone?

  “Austin. Honey.” My voice broke in my throat like an eggshell. “Are you okay?”

  “Mmm-hmm. Yuh. Just, uh, waking up.” There came the elongated, winded sound of him stretching, followed by a crack of bone. He’d slept? “Uh, Dad’s in the bathroom. Do you want me to bring the phone in?”

  “No. No. Look, I just want you to know, Austin,” I said as steadily as I could, blinking at the ceiling, “I’m absolutely fine, okay? I haven’t been kidnapped. I haven’t had any sort of accident—”

  “Okay. Hey Mom?” he said. “Were you really in a chicken-wing-eating contest?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “This guy at the bar? Lenny? When we called—”

  The receiver slipped; I caught it by the metal snake of its cord as it swung back and forth. “Wait? What?” I said, returning it to my ear. “How did you know where I was last night?”

  “Uh, your ‘Find My iPhone’ app?”

  “My what?”

  “That tracking thing? I set it up for you, after that time in the supermarket? Uh, Dad has me use it to follow you sometimes. Like, when you’re going downtown.”

  I’d been twisting the drawstring of my hoodie around in my fingers. I stopped.

  “Your father has you put me under surveillance?” I said. “Like with a drone?”

  “No, jeez. It’s just an app, Mom,” Austin said. “Last night, when Dad got home and you still weren’t here. And you weren’t answering texts or calls or anything? He started getting freaked, you know, like maybe you’d been in an accident or something. So I went online and did the trace and we saw you were, like, in this tiny town in Pennsylvania. At this place called Johnny’s? So, like, just to be sure that you hadn’t been, like, robbed or beaten or carjacked or anything—and, you know, like, some criminal was using your phone—Dad called the place to check. And the manager said to call some other guy there on his cell phone, and to maybe text him your photo because the bar was, like, packed, and though while he didn’t think he’d seen you based on our description, he couldn’t be sure? So I ended up talking to this one guy, who passed me to this other guy Lenny, who was like this Hell’s Angel—he was pretty cool, actually—and he said you were doing this big chicken-wing-eating contest with them. But then he couldn’t find you. He thought maybe you’d gotten sick on the wings, so he sent this woman to check to see if you were, like, throwing up in the bathroom. And in the meantime, while we were waiting, he asked me if I’d ever known anyone who’d been in Nam, so I told him about Grandma and Grandpa, and oh, hey—”

  Suddenly, there was a muffled sound. For a moment, I pulled the receiver away and actually stared at it to verify what I was hearing: This was the most I’d heard Austin talk in months—in years, possibly. Yet then I heard him say, “Yeah, it’s her,” and there came an abrupt, violent shift of air, and Joey was suddenly yelling into the phone: “You went to a bar, Donna? A roadhouse in Pennsylvania? Are you out of your fucking mind?” and before he could say anything else, I hung up the phone so hard it seemed to ring back on itself.

  “Fuck!” I shouted at the pay phone. Grabbing the receiver, I slammed it back onto its cradle once, twice, three times, as if I were bludgeoning it, each time making it give a metallic cry of reverberation. Impressively, the man reading the newspaper and the other Laundromat customers never even glanced at me.

  I paced, panting. The nerve! The unfairness of it all! They’d slept soundly while I’d been in my car? They’d been monitoring me? Was there no real escaping, no anonymity anywhere anymore? And yet no one at Johnny’s had even noticed me?
How had I managed to remain under constant surveillance, yet utterly invisible at the same time?

  And Joey had just instantly assumed I had fallen off the wagon? This unleashed a whole new wave of fury in me. He did not trust me?

  I glanced wildly around the Laundromat, its washing machines all vibrating in unison, the dryers thrumming and chugging out a bass line: a narcotizing orchestra of appliances. For a moment I felt the perverse, overwhelming desire to yank all the clothing out of the dryers and rip it to shreds. I looked back at the pay phone. I picked up the receiver again.

  As I fed more quarters into the slot, I was shaking. I knew Brenda’s number by heart like a melody: Back in the days before smartphones, I’d dialed it repeatedly for years. Still, my fingers could barely punch out the digits. I wasn’t sure if the number still worked—or even where Brenda was living nowadays: New York? LA? the Caribbean? But the beeps of the keypad beat out her name with a hopeful, nostalgic, pneumonic singsong: Bren-da, Bren-da.

  If you were an insomniac with basic cable anytime between 1999 and 2008, chances are you might have known my friend Brenda, too. Except you’d have known her as Madame LaShonda Peyroux, the celebrated Jamaican clairvoyant on the “Channeling Channel” who did past-life regressions and tarot card predictions on-air for $1.99/minute.

  Whatever’s ailin’ ya, darlin’, whether it’s love, money, or health problems, Madame LaShonda Peyroux would say, her head wrapped in a Rasta kerchief, her enormous hoop earrings bobbing as she spoke, I’m gonna do a reading for ya an’ fix ya up right. Just call me here, darlin’, right now, at 1-900-CHANNEL. All the while, a phone number flashed insanely below her in big purple numbers. Madame LaShonda Peyroux’s infomercials became so iconic, at one point they were parodied on Saturday Night Live.

  Long before she’d been recruited to play this flamboyant cable TV soothsayer, however, I’d known her as Brenda Lena Peebles, my freshman roommate at the University of Michigan. She’d swanned into Ann Arbor straight from Miss Porter’s School for Girls in Fairfield, Connecticut. My first day of college, I’d arrived at our dorm to find her mother, an impeccably coiffed woman in a floor-length chinchilla, fussily smoothing a coverlet over the choicer of the two beds.

  “Oh, hello. You must be Donna, yes?” She paused long enough to proffer a hand weighted with rings. “I’m Dr. Peebles, Brenda’s mom. Brennie’s gone downstairs for more boxes.”

  “Oh. Hey. Hi.” I stood clutching my guitar case and my father’s old army duffel; I smiled awkwardly. Doctor Peebles’s skin was like dark syrup. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized Brenda was black.

  Her mother regarded my fuchsia hair and my leather jacket gouged with safety pins. Her eyes stopped at the padlock on the thick chain around my neck.

  She fixed me in a sterilizing gaze. “Tell me you’re not in one of those skinhead bands,” she said.

  Only then did I realize what a gross misjudgment my outfit had been when I’d assembled it that morning, hoping to establish myself as a punk renegade. I felt my face flush.

  “What? Oh God, no,” I cried. “I’m Jewish. My grandparents fled the Nazis. My band’s alternative, is all.”

  Dr. Peebles frowned. “So. This is all just for effect? Dramatis personae?” She returned to smoothing out the bedspread in a soldierly way. “Well, that’s a fine fettle,” she murmured. “Peas in a pod.”

  As if on cue, a girl sashayed in dressed in riding boots and a suede bolero jacket glinting with dozens of little gold buckles. She was nearly liquid in her motions the way a ballerina or an ice-skater might be, carrying a billowy ficus as if it weighed nothing at all. A trail of emerald leaves lay strewn in her wake. “Hey, are you Donna? Bienvenue,” she said. Her face was wide and flat, with high cheekbones that made her look slightly Asian. Her dark hair was sculpted in a theatrical swoosh over her left eye. As she smiled, a small, distinct gap between her two front teeth gave her a mischievous, saucy look. She shifted the plant to her hip to free her hand. “Obviously, I’m Brenda.” Behind her, a darker-skinned young man in a tie and sunglasses lumbered in hauling a trunk. “And this is Roland,” she said breezily, “my attaché.”

  Roland snorted. “Yeah. Keep dreaming.” Dropping the trunk with a thud, he exited, then returned carrying a Macintosh SE computer, a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, several crates of CDs, a tennis racket, ice skates, and last but not least, an entire case of microwave popcorn. “Mom,” he said to Dr. Peebles, who was now hanging white eyelet curtains over Brenda’s side of the windows, “Dad says to hurry up. He’s blocking the fire lane.” Dr. Peebles nodded but proceeded, unhurriedly, to begin lining Brenda’s dresser drawers. “Now, Brennie, be sure and register for Organic Chemistry first thing,” she said, slicing a roll of parchment with an X-Acto knife. “Those courses fill up quickly, you know. And don’t forget to call your grandmother and thank her for the electric blanket. And Reverend Putney should get a call, too. Maybe even a note. He’s expecting you.”

  When her family finally departed, Brenda flopped across her bed and pressed her wrist dramatically to her forehead. “Oh my God. Fifteen hours in the car with all of that. I was getting ready to hang myself with my seat belt.” Propping herself up on her elbows, she gazed at me. “Wow. Pink hair. That’s genius. I should totally do that, too.” She shook her head in a whinnying way. “Please, tell me. Is your mother anywhere near as overbearing as mine?”

  I shrugged and looked down at the bare tiles on my side of the room. “I don’t know,” I said. “She’s dead.”

  Brenda clamped her hands over her mouth. The stark awfulness of my words hung in the air between us like an enormous fart. “Oh my God,” I said. For some reason, I started to laugh. “Oh my God. I’m such an asshole! Who the hell meets their roommate and is like, ‘You think your mother is bad? Well, mine is dead’!”

  Brenda started laughing, too. She laughed the way I did: honking and deep-bellied and loud. The sound of our laughter made us laugh even harder. We bent over ourselves, gasping, fanning the air. “Oh, please. Stop. Stop!”

  “Ow, my lungs.”

  Finally, we collected ourselves.

  “Well.” Brenda grinned, dabbing her eyes. “You certainly know how to make small talk.”

  Brenda’s parents were insisting she become a doctor, though she herself longed to be an actress. Already at Miss Porter’s, she’d played the inspector in Arsenic and Old Lace, Tatiana, and Ado Annie. “I think I was the first black girl in Oklahoma ever,” she said.

  We were both artists, she and I understood, each a rebel and an outsider in our own way, brimming with aspiration. All semester long, she’d sit on her bed late at night with a textbook on her lap, kneading peach-scented moisturizer into her elbows as she memorized alkene basics, while I sat in my desk chair, plucking out notes on my Stratocaster and jotting lyrics on a notepad. Inevitably, I’d set aside my work and grab two Bartles & Jaymes Light Berry wine coolers from our mini-fridge. “Your cocktail, milady?” I’d say, bowing, and she’d say, “Oh, how ever so thoughtful of you, milady.” Much to the annoyance of our hall mates, Brenda and I were constantly addressing each other in British accents—hers cribbed from My Fair Lady, mine from the Sex Pistols.

  When a guy next door remarked loudly that Brenda “didn’t sound black” and that I “didn’t look Jewish,” we began calling ourselves “Shylock and Dreadlock” just to fuck with him—Brenda speaking with a Yiddish accent, me like a Rastafarian—cracking ourselves up with our wit. Brenda did wrinkle her nose at my punk albums (“If I wanted to hear white people yelling all day, I could just go back to Philly”), while I groaned whenever she put on her show tunes (“God, Bren, Pippin is enough to give you diabetes”). We also gravitated toward different groups on campus. (She began sitting at the “black table” in the dining hall, experimenting with braids and natural hair. “Which has the added benefit,” she explained to me one night, “of pissing off my mother.”) Nevertheless, at the end of each day, we were always each other’s trusted af
ter-party. An enthusiastic intimacy took root that perhaps only occurs when you’re eighteen—and wide open to the world—and the words “hanging out” are still a verb, not a description.

  After college, when Joey and I got married, Brenda flew back from the Royal Academy in London. We exchanged mixtapes, birthday cards, long-distance phone calls as she hopped from LA to Chicago to Williamstown. But the year I got pregnant with Austin, Brenda called from New York to tell me she’d been offered her own cable TV show. She’d been asked to perform psychic readings and past-life regressions for the Channeling Channel based on a Jamaican alter ego she’d crafted for herself in an improv troupe in Lower Manhattan.

  “Can you believe they want me to do this?” Brenda said. “Madame LaShonda Peyroux is a parody, for Chrissakes! She’s like that bit we used to do in our dorm! Does anyone really believe Jamaicans talk this way?”

  “Your own TV show? Brennie, that’s awesome,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said vaguely. “I suppose. My agent says I need more TV credits. Plus, the show would go on live from 9 p.m. to 11. So I’d still have my days free to audition. Plus,” she said with a sigh, “it’s not exactly like anyone’s breaking down the doors to hire classically trained black actresses.” And then, of course, there was acting lesson numero uno: Never turn down a steady paycheck.

  Oddly, I seemed more excited than Brenda did. Okay, so it wasn’t Shakespeare. But more people, I told her, would probably sooner watch a fake Jamaican psychic than Troilus and Cressida. “Don’t think of it as a parody so much as a tribute,” I suggested.

  Brenda had based her character, of course, on her great-aunt Eliza. Tellingly, Great-Aunt Eliza had been the only member of the Peebles family who had not cut Brenda off after she turned down medical school.