by Kate Wisel
Frankie, you’re the positive. I’m the negative, aren’t I?
I feel my own tears begin to roll in the wrong direction, behind my ears and down the back of my neck and onto Frankie’s sheets. And then her palm on my forehead like she’s checking my temp. She moves it to my neck, where my pulse jumps, wet and receptive. She takes her hand away, then backs up to the door. I whisper, “You should skip class. Please?”
“I can’t,” she says.
She says, “Stop being sad.”
I say, “I can’t.”
My eyes are still closed, but I can feel her there. The smallest creak, the shlack of the lock, the keys on her carabiner jangling off her hip as she skips down the steps. Why does she do this to me? I want to rip open the window and scream at the birds. I want Frankie to rip open the window to scream at me, just so I can scream back: “I’m not sad. Stay the fuck out of my business. Get your own life if that’s what you want so bad. You think some guy is going to strong-arm you out of the muck? Good luck with it.” But I stay still and stiff, my cold palm on my chest. I listen to my own heart beating two skips too fast.
Hear it? Frankie. Frankie.
SHE SAYS SHE WANTS ONE THING
EVERYTHING I BROUGHT TO court was intentional, including the book. But when I looked down at my shoes, I noticed I’d forgotten to shave my legs, a mistake. The public prosecutor strode towards me in her pants suit. She circled my name on her clipboard. I felt chosen. She led the way to the conference room, which looked like a DJ’s booth, that strip of thick glass. Inside it was just an office. I rested the book in my lap, as well as a pen I’d retrieved from my bun. The prosecutor was a woman, of course. I wrote down: eye shadow, sooty like the rim of a Yankee Candle.
“I have a quick question,” I said, smiling my best smile, the one I used on my students when I allowed them to hand in work six weeks late. “I was wondering how long this will take. I may have to cancel an important meeting.”
“Shouldn’t be long,” she said, then went on with it.
“Do you fear for your safety?” she asked. “Do you wish to press charges against Niko Vitalis?”
I went into autopilot. I’d pictured her more like a female James Lipton, but she was rushed and formulaic.
“Are you aware that dropping these charges will result in them disappearing forever?”
“Please turn off your phone,” she said. Then I was led back into the row. Next to me was a girl my age deprived of eyelashes. She wore a tiny nose ring and an orthopedic boot on her foot—how obvious. The woman in front of us twisted in her seat and stared at me directly, her breasts flopping under a pilled blouse.
The men sat on the other side, leaning forward on the bench, rubbing together their palms. One of them stood, bending to run a belt through the loops on his sagging khakis. There was the young guy I saw outside the court, screaming into his girlfriend’s face with a cigarette stuck to his lip. He looked belligerent, with the bloated red eyes of an alcoholic.
When I received the summons in the mail, I’d pictured just me and the judge as he read my case out loud, my understanding of the night in question deepening like a story narrated by a man with a serious voice. Then I pictured a cross-examination. Like an army kid in a new cafeteria, I could be anybody. Not anybody—different.
“Who is your favorite singer—alive or dead?” the lawyer would say, possessed by his pen, his head bent as he turned on his heel.
“I’m an adult.”
“Would you consider yourself an optimist or a pessimist?”
“Only an optimist could sit in this seat.”
“What are you writing down?” he’d say before pausing, the points of our pens frozen as if eyeing each other.
“The things that take my attention.”
“After you began crying, what happened?”
“I’ll tell you what happened,” I’d say. I’d speak, my voice so faint that the stenographer would lean forward in her seat, her heels rising from their burrows in the plush of the carpet. The judge would take off his glasses slowly. He’d think of me at lunch as he stared curiously into the depths of his chicken Caesar salad.
“All rise,” said the judge, a woman.
I’d been in the front pages of the book, writing: the judge’s gold-etched name on the stand, describing her hair color, mom-blond. My sentences were microscopic on those blank pages where nothing is dedicated to anyone, no epigraphs to anchor any context. A man was called to the stand.
“Good morning, Mr. Johnson,” the judge said.
Mr. Johnson had violated a no-contact order, missed parenting and anger-management classes, and, to top it off, would be back in court for a felony.
“He has been given chance after chance, but . . . ,” the public defender said. His black hair was slicked back in an impossible wave. I could see him sliding credit cards to waiters and the muscles that tightened his suit. He looked like an Armenian on a reality show, the kind of man whose sole purpose was to do the right thing by his family, no matter what.
In God We Trust. That was what was plastered on the wall, like an advertisement. I jotted it down, wrote: Who is we? The judge dismissed Mr. Johnson. And so it went. The women behind me in their printed blouses sighed as if we were waiting in line for another line. But the men on the other side were in worse shape. Violations, unpaid charges, subsequent offenses. The judge nodded to them each affably. She was stern but friendly as a kindergarten teacher, one from the Midwest, who bent to correct an unzipped fly or to hand you a fresh sheet of paper. I wrote it all down.
“Are you employed?” she asked the delinquent kid with the bloated eyes.
“Nah,” he said. He had nicks on the back of his skull from a garage buzz. I could tell, even with his back turned, that he had his fists crossed in front of his crotch, as if to say, “Suck it.”
I zoned out hard as I moved my pen across the page but jerked as the kid smacked open the gate with his palms. I heard him say something like, “Ah, fuck yeah,” as he limped clean out the double doors, the gate swinging wildly behind him. The judge and the handsome defender shared a moment as they huffed, rolled their eyes. By this point I had slipped into the first row, and assumed they’d turn to me next. We would triangulate, shaking our heads, mystified with the idiocy of this delinquent moron.
Next up was a man I hadn’t noticed who walked to face the judge like he was tiptoeing across an endless sheet of ice. He wore a light blue cotton shirt and matching pants like nurses’ scrubs. He had his own attorney. The attorney had cotton ball hair like a Floridian. He stood erect as a surfboard in the sand, speaking to the judge in a loud, demanding tone that made both her and me turn our attention to him from opposite vantages.
“I’d just like to say”—his voice rebounded from the wooden walls—“for the record . . .”
Now, this attorney was the kind of man who could smack a woman and get away with it. He was building empires with his lies and spoke with force, so you’d be slow enough to agree. It took energy, for which I had none, to steel myself against agreeing. The man who the attorney was representing pounded at his chest—I was surprised a chicken bone didn’t fly out—and shifted his feet from one side to the other.
“ . . . that the plaintiff, who, might I add, has a warrant, has contacted me multiple times, though there is record that she has dropped the charges against the defendant. She calls me repeatedly. She showed up unannounced at my office. A stripper with a warrant . . .”
The judge looked down at the attorney patiently.
“. . . I don’t believe it!”
The man in handcuffs held his forearms over the table and leaned as though he were stretching for a marathon.
“She says she wants one thing, and then she does another. I mean, as you know, this is what happens with domestic violence cases.”
“It’s what can happen,” the judge corrected. “Sir, are you okay?”
“He has Crohn’s disease,” the attorney spat, like she was a fucking i
diot and always would be for not knowing.
“He can be excused,” she said, and the sheriff held her hand over his back to guide him through the back door as he hobbled.
I could have sat there all day. I was sleepy enough anyway, my name creeping up on the list. More cases. More cases. Everything moving through the tight screen of logistics. Yes or no. How many months. Amount of the bail. Why were we women rowed up on the benches audition-style when we were the ones who deserved to leave first? The room was split in two, and these slum, criminal wife-beaters were getting to go first, while the ring-twisting women they had beaten and would beat again had to wait for hours, listening to the litany of their charges, wasting entire days of their lives.
My life specifically. I was dead-ending at an after-school program in Dorchester, managing teenagers who talked over me on a good day. I was supposed to go for a run, maybe even reread the book on my thigh. There should have been a suggestion box outside the courtroom. The men received all the attention, so much emphasis on their situations, whereas when we women were finally called to the stand, one by one, we were asked, one hand raised to God, if we’d like to proceed with the case we had initiated. And then we were dismissed. Not a woman proceeded.
I wrote down every observation in the courtroom that day while I waited four more hours. I was writing a story, and needed to remember all the details. The judge’s bench where something like a McIntosh apple should have been sitting shiny, the belt clicking against the man’s starved waist, the eye shadow like candle smoke, raised hands. In God We Trust.
“Do you trust in God?” I pictured the lawyer asking me.
“I’m no client,” I’d say.
At one point a large woman in a do-rag opened the gate and dragged her tiny son behind her. The boy looked drawn from a picture book and dropped his hand from her grip, then reached up to slip a phone the size of his head out from her back pocket. He moved his fingers over the shattered screen as the woman held up her palm. The phone sounded through the room, the disrupting jangle of an ice-cream truck.
“Shhhhhh,” she hissed as she reached back for his collar.
“It’s okay,” the judge said. “It’s all right.”
When I couldn’t write anymore, I pictured myself rising above the women. Had the judge noticed me sitting there, writing, or would she notice me when I walked through the gate, my face unwrinkled, my cheekbones high like a child’s, mighty? I would walk to the stand, puncturing the disaffected haze of their side. My hair twisted back in a way that looked trustworthy and refined. I’d hold the book in my hands.
After this, there’d be two months of happiness. Real happiness, not the kind you have to lie about. And then Niko would call me one day after I spent money at Target on jeans and a comforter. He’d call it his money and why this and why that. Guess what. It was his money. He’d push me up the stairs—yeah, up, because I was moving too slowly. He’d hit me so hard across the nose with a dress shoe that my own blood would shoot across the dining room and cover the glass hutch, where I kept books instead of dinner plates. I’d hold my nose as I fell, the cartilage blown to rubber. Permanently, it would look like the manic swerve of a tire track.
“You’re too pretty to be here,” the judge would say. Or, softly, “What is that you’re reading? Come.”
I would hold up the book, place it in her hands. She would turn it over, read each starred review. Make the connection. At night, her husband would try to kiss her on the cheek as she tucked her hands under a pillow, her eyes open to a dark wall. She would do nothing but dream of me. I was that bright. I pictured it exactly like this, as one of the best days of my life.
FRANKIE
CRIBS
SUMMIT AVE
Raffa comes to live with you in December during school break.
You and Natalya have a two-bedroom off Harvard Ave, a quiet street. You’ve gotten used to Nat’s half-hung Freddie Mercury posters and dirty laundry, splitting toilet paper but not toothpaste. You haven’t gotten used to Nat’s hushed green eyes, her bee-stung lips, a beauty so rough that it’s pretty.
You and Nat have never been in one fight. At night, she plays you Paolo Nutini from her laptop. She lets you read her father’s love letters from Ukraine.
You and Nat carry Raffa’s new Ikea bed up through the snow, heavy on the black ice of the stairs. Nat looks at you like Raffa’s draped across it. The three of you crack Budweisers as Raffa folds jeans into a dresser she sticks in the front hall, holding pairs up by your hips, tossing them to you for trying on. Raffa wants to paint the kitchen electric purple and buy a fruit basket. Nat guzzles her beer too fast and it gushes out her nose like a science project. The neighbors next door have kids and knock softly, asking you to please keep it down.
In the living room, you push the couches into one bed and fall asleep at 3 a.m., for months. Raffa doesn’t step away to take phone calls and talks loudly in her sleep. Every cabinet is crammed. Every wall is covered. At Summit, there is less and more space.
THE HILL
Everybody gets fat in one day. You are ravenous and rarely full. Raffa’s friends from school come to your place on Griggs Street, and your kitchen is always bumbling. You run out, like gypsies across the train tracks on Comm Ave, in peasant skirts with your hair tied up at the top.
At 7-Eleven you infiltrate aisles, cackling by the freezer. You line up to dump Doritos, ramen noodles, Boston cream doughnuts in cellophane baggies, sunflower seeds, Mini-Wheats, and a gallon of milk onto the counter in front of Manny, who watches you shop from the surveillance with a toothpick in his teeth. Serena always needs two more dollars, so you fish for quarters at the bottom of your backpack, careful not to look up at Manny.
Serena slips through your cracked bathroom window when your keys drop through the gutter’s steaming bars. She makes a mess of mac and cheese and passes around the pot. Doughnuts with bite marks sit in the flower-painted fruit bowl on top of last year’s Halloween candy and packets of matches from bars you’ve never been to.
She moves in wordlessly, falls asleep in your bed, head to foot. She wakes up laughing from bad dreams. Her hair dyed and dark at the roots. She buys the shampoo, the Kool-Aid, the nail polish, the Tylenol PM. Leaves it in the medicine cabinet, fills empty Advil bottles with dental meds.
On the toilet, you let Serena comb her fingers through your hair. She mixes up a box of clearance Nice’n Easy and smooths out tinfoil, her wifebeater cutting above her hips. Your eyes level with her belly button, a surprised mouth. Nat leans against the doorway, snaps her Nikon. You don’t care when your hair fries to wisps and Serena cuts it, or how big you are. You will all lose weight by the fall. In the apartment, there is more and less of you.
LORRAINE TERRACE
You finally move to a place with a porch behind an elementary school and it’s like a clubhouse. Raffa’s leaving to go abroad in a month, and just in time, her ex-boyfriend Mickey gets her pregnant. She stays inside all month like a house cat you can only pet or observe. She stays by the sink, rinsing bowls. On your new porch, painting her nails intently, listening for the soundtrack of a distant recess. She rests, facing the wall in her Ikea bed, which starts to look like a wrought iron crib.
After her abortion, it barely becomes spring. You go out to the porch. It’s wet from icicles dripping fast and smells like cardboard rushing down a river. Inside you had scrawled wishes onto torn sheets of notebook paper. Nat throws a match into a red bucket, then follows the smoke with her lens.
Seconds become days become summer. The apartment makes you itchy. The summer’s superstitious. Curtains billow like ghostly skirts. Raffa’s flicking her perpetual cigarette. She tells you the nurse who gave her an ultrasound traced the screen with her finger and said, “Twins.”
ELIOT STREET
In Allston, you hear they call September first Christmas, and now you know why. You sit on a collapsing box, surveying all the mismatched dining room chairs you found on the curb, airing your stomach out with your
T-shirt.
“It’s hotter than outside,” Nat says, her cheeks a secret pink.
“Guys, get in,” Raffa says from the bathroom, where she’s running water.
You sit on the edge as Nat and Raffa and Serena undress. The water sways slowly like it knows something. They dip their toes, then lower themselves in. Raffa stops the drain, her spirals half soaked down her shoulders. She lights a cigarette.
Next year, you and Serena will move into your own place on Berkeley Street, the cathedral’s bells an alarm clock. The clouds passing fast as screen savers outside your window behind the still, torn faces of the billboard’s women. Nat will move to San Francisco for a job in advertising. Raffa will move to the North End with Mick. You’ll talk on the phone.
“When we have kids,” Raffa says, dangling her wrist, “you’ll be aunties.”
She places the cigarette in Nat’s lips. Nat extends her neck to exhale, blowing smoke away from you. You skim your fingers across the water as ash falls to the surface and separates, blackening to bits of lace.
“And when we get divorced,” Raffa finishes, “we’ll all move back in.”
You smile. She winks. You’re waiting, for this heat to let up, for fall to bleed out into winter. For now, you are pool balls, in your triangular lifetime, waiting to get shot out and whirled.
STAGE FOUR
WHAT I DID WAS held my hand out like a gun and sprayed. I was supposed to be wiping down tables. But there was something about walking through the pink mist—I can’t tell you the feeling. That clinical smell that clung to my neck like antiseptic perfume. At that time and that time only, I liked doing the opposite of what I was told.
I was breathing in the rinsed air when this guy wandered in and crouched down at the end of the bar. He was in a white blouse with one of those dog-chain gang-rape necklaces gleaming down his neck. I watched him, a bold move that made him turn to me as he tapped his combat boot on the leg of the stool.