Look at Me

by Jennifer Egan

  As he stepped from my apartment into the hall, I said, “Just a minute.”

  He stopped. I sensed impatience, the cool mathematician prowling behind his sandy face. “Yes?”

  “How do I look?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look at me,” I said, and he did. “If you were going to describe me, what would you say?”

  He took a long look. The light in the hall was warm and flattering. I found myself holding my breath.

  “You look tired,” he said, and the two halves of him fused in a moment of humanity. It wasn’t what I’d hoped for, yet I felt relieved.

  “Good night, Paul Shepherd,” I said.

  Chapter Three

  Toward the end of her bicycle ride, Ellen’s daughter, Charlotte, paused in Shorewood Park to watch the water-skiers from beside the spindly bleachers arranged on the riverbank for the Wednesday and Friday night water shows. One wore a red bathing suit. He buzzed in Charlotte’s direction, hewing the river in two until she hid her face. But it wasn’t Scott Hess. All summer long he had haunted her, and she hadn’t seen him yet.

  Unsure of the time, she resumed pedaling toward home. They were having dinner tonight with Uncle Moose, a biannual ritual that always roused in Charlotte an anticipatory flutter, some peculiar alloy of expectation and dread. She found herself rushing, now, streaking past the restored portion of Rockford’s original marshland—brackish water, broken sticks—past modest houses and raw-throated dogs and lawns that smelled of the river. She skimmed under the Spring Creek Bridge and ploughed the paved jogging path beside the old railroad tracks, tame and manicured now, surrounded by grass.

  Near the YMCA she stopped to cool off. A man in a yellow shirt sat cross-legged on the Rock River’s grassy bank, one arm in a sling. Charlotte leaned her bike against a picnic table and moved closer to him. She took off her glasses, letting the lush greens mingle with the river’s muddy brown. Rockford was a nineteenth-century town, bisected north to south by the Rock River. On the west side, across the water from where Charlotte stood, were a smattering of brick factory buildings and a neglected downtown; north of these were the industrialists’ old riverside homes, still cushioned by dense trees and thick, fragrant lawns. A fatigue seemed to hang over these original parts of the city, as if their exertions of a hundred years ago had drained them beyond recovery. Nowadays, the action lay on the river’s east side, where Charlotte lived, whose vital artery was not the river at all but State Street, running west to east, accruing strip malls and superstores and condominium spuds as it moved farther from the old city center until, by the time it reached the interstate, five miles out, it encompassed six lanes of traffic.

  The last time Charlotte had seen Uncle Moose, she’d been seated beside him at the country club. He was a history professor at Winnebago College: a handsome, erratic man whose attention she could never fully capture. When he’d opened his wallet to pay for dinner (insisting, despite her father’s protestations), she had glimpsed inside it a picture she’d noticed before. Of water. The only picture he carried.

  “What’s that?” she’d asked, but Moose seemed not to hear. “That picture,” she said, more softly. “What is it?”

  Moose slid the picture from its cheap plastic sleeve and handed it over. It was a photograph of a river, ancient, sepia-toned, its whites bleached to snow. It had the beloved, handled look of pictures of people’s children. But it was a river. At the bottom, someone had scratched into the negative “Rock River, 1904.”

  The strangeness of this had affronted Charlotte. “What’s the point of it?” she asked.

  Moose glanced at her with dark, skittish eyes. Charlotte sensed that she’d disappointed him. “Evidence,” was all he said.

  It surprised her, how many times she’d thought of that photograph in the intervening months. Rock River, 1904. A domed building—or had she invented it? A riverboat. Church steeples. Evidence, he’d said. Evidence of what?

  The man on the grass had turned and was looking up at her. “Good evening,” he said, with odd formality. Even without her glasses, Charlotte knew she had never seen him before. He had a long gash down one side of his face. Inside his sling she saw an arm in a cast.

  “The girl in perpetual motion,” he said. “Every day, on that bicycle.”

  A weirdo, Charlotte thought, and her interest sharpened. The man rose to his feet, as if it bothered him to sit while she was standing. He wore old khakis and had a tired adulthood about him, a relief from the evil cuteness of boys her age. He moved with a limp. Charlotte wondered what had happened to him.

  “Rockford, Illinois,” he said, and the curl of his accent, which she’d barely noticed, bent against her city’s name. “So very ugly.”

  “Go back where you came from, if you don’t like it,” she said.

  He smiled. White teeth. “That’s not possible.”

  “Then don’t call it ugly.”

  He studied her. “How old are you, if I may ask?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “You’re pretty.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “I’m not.”

  “Unusual.”

  “That’s not the same.”

  “It lasts longer.”

  Liar, Charlotte thought, but she was flattered. Her build was slight but very strong; “wiry” was a word people used to describe her, though in her own view, she was distinguished by a near-total absence of breasts. She had waited, hoping they would arrive, erupt, emerge—rise from the bony tray of her chest like two lovely cakes. Last year, she had ordered a pressure device from the back pages of a magazine (it arrived in plain brown paper) and squeezed it between her palms each morning and night; at a later, more desperate juncture, she had swallowed fifty green pills of dubious provenance on successive nights, pills that made her urine smell like lavender.

  “Boys don’t like me,” she told the man, emboldened by the very fact that he was a stranger.

  “They’ll grow up,” he said, “and admire your eyes.”

  “I wear glasses.” She was holding them in her hand.

  He scanned her face as if trying to imagine it. Charlotte resisted the urge to put her glasses on. “Contacts hurt,” she explained.

  “Glasses are normal,” he said.

  Across the river, the sun had vanished behind downtown like a coin in a slot. Charlotte wondered how long she’d been standing there. She straddled her bike. “Well. Adios.”

  The man raised a hand to his injured face. An indeterminate gesture, part salute, part wave.

  Charlotte sailed the short distance to the Y, then peeled around it to the expressway. She felt jittery, breathless. In life she was secretive: a hoarder of thoughts and fears and weaknesses—most of all her hopes, lest they be diminished. Yet in the presence of strangers, confidences forced themselves from Charlotte almost indiscriminately, drummed out by some pressure she was not even aware of. Later, she would reassure herself that no one would ever find out—the people didn’t know her name! That was the beauty of it.

  She scampered her bike across the expressway, pavement hot under her tennis shoes, white lights of distant cars pulsing toward her in the dusty sunset. Her own street dead-ended against the expressway’s opposite side; she pedaled up the long driveway and left her bike in the shed. Her mother watched from the kitchen window as Charlotte ran across the lawn. Ellen was dressed for dinner, her hair in a clip.

  “Where have you been?” she cried. “We’re leaving in ten minutes!”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “Go. Go. You’re all sweaty.”

  “I’m going!”

  In her bedroom, Charlotte paused to check on her fish, veiled, mysterious creatures suspended in saltwater. They had an air of great knowing, as if this room, this house, this life of hers could be understood by the fish in silent, watery reverse. Charlotte had worked for nearly a year at Fish World, where she had a discount.

  She showered quickly and returned to the kitchen, where Ricky and he
r father were beginning a game of chess. Harris had taught him in the hospital; their matches could straddle days.

  “How was your ride?” her father asked.

  “Good. Hot.”

  She stood at the refrigerator pouring a glass of juice, her father’s gaze jabbing her between the shoulder blades. “You thought any more about this school thing?” he said at last, with strained nonchalance.

  She drained the glass. “Nope.” She was thinking of the man by the river, feeling the beat of residual excitement.

  Her mother hurried into the kitchen, high heels clipping the tiles. “Come on, come on,” she said. “We’re late.”

  “Ding-ding, Mom,” Ricky said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  They took Ellen’s new Lexus, gliding over the expressway in the silky beginnings of dusk, Ricky flopped against Charlotte in the backseat as if she were an element of the upholstery. In the rearview mirror, Harris observed this physical ease between his kids with a kind of wonderment; when he tried to hold Ricky—even touch him, sometimes—his son flinched away like a deer. Ricky’s hair had grown back fine and dark; he was beautiful, this boy of thirteen, beautiful in a way that unnerved people, made them gape at him in the supermarket, the hospital. Harris was embarrassed by this beauty of his son’s, as if it bespoke some indulgence or folly of his own. But it was all Ellen’s: the olive skin, the long black eyes.

  As they crossed the river on the Spring Creek Bridge, Charlotte glanced north and saw the water-skiers still there. It wasn’t Scott Hess, but she sank into the memory nevertheless: a party last fall, the beginning of sophomore year, when she’d smoked pot and gotten stoned, her first time. Skidding, uncontrollable laughter, dipping French fries into mustard, then dabbing them in Equal, which was all the party giver’s diet-conscious mother had around. Everyone swarming into a purple Jeep with Scott Hess: athlete, star, junior, a boy to whom Charlotte never had spoken directly. Squashed against him in front, she’d grown less aware of the wriggling kids around her, less aware of R.E.M. on the stereo, and more aware of the heat issuing from Scott Hess’s upper arm. A sick, painful longing came loose in her. Each time Scott turned the wheel, Charlotte pressed harder against him as if by accident, and he groaned, nursing football injuries.

  As it happened, Charlotte lived nearest to Scott, so after he’d dropped everyone off it was just the two of them in the purple Jeep, making polite chat about the game and Scott’s bruised knee and dislocated shoulder, not to mention the black eye he’d sustained in a locker room fight two weeks ago. “And then there’s the stuff you don’t see,” he said. “My back’s shot—I’m on painkillers half the time, and what about this?” He brandished aloft his left thumb. “I can’t even straighten it all the way!” Charlotte only half-listened. She felt like an old radio issuing weird, splintering frequencies; she would perish if she couldn’t touch Scott Hess, or make him touch her.

  Two blocks from her house, she said, “Hey, stop the car a sec.” Quizzically, Scott pulled over and Charlotte shimmied close and kissed him on the lips, actually took his face in her hands (“Where did you get the guts?” her friends asked later, but it had taken no guts at all), and Scott, though initially startled, responded to her ministrations with rising enthusiasm. Soon he was driving again—toward an old orchard, it turned out, wizened trees contorted against the cloudy night.

  “What kind of trees are those?” Charlotte asked, making conversation as Scott fought with the knobs controlling her seat.

  “Pear I think.” He’d pushed her seat back to a horizontal position and was yanking open her jeans. “You know, from back in the day.” Then he climbed on top of her (supporting himself with his un-dislocated arm), and with one or two grunts of pain from his wounds dispensed with her virginity and collapsed on top of her in an apparent faint. It hurt. Charlotte pressed her eyes shut, amazed at how much it hurt, yet beneath the pain she felt the hunger still, completely unslaked. Scott’s head lay on her chest like a meteorite. Charlotte opened her eyes and watched pear trees drop their clenched leaves on the windshield. Finally, maneuvering her mouth close to Scott’s ear, she whispered, “Can you, like, do something else?”

  No response. Then, at last, some intimation of consciousness bestirred Scott’s bulk, and he lifted his head and muttered, “I look like Superman to you?” which Charlotte took to be a joke, an ironic commentary on his paltry efforts thus far, until Scott hauled himself from her, groaning like an old ship being lifted from the sea to have its barnacles scraped, looked down into her face with his small, blank eyes and said, “I don’t even know you.”

  An instant later, it seemed, he was driving toward Charlotte’s house while she yanked up her underwear, barely managing to zip her jeans before she found herself standing at the mouth of her driveway. “Thanks,” she said, not entirely managing to purge her voice of sarcasm. Scott Hess looked straight ahead and said nothing.

  Charlotte had assumed he would keep quiet about what had happened—what was there to brag about? But by Monday morning everyone in her small class had been alerted to the fact that Charlotte was a mad slut who’d thrown herself at Scott and begged him for it doggie style, that she’d given him five blow jobs and still wanted more—that she was a nympho animal who couldn’t get enough. Walking through school that Monday had been like finding herself abruptly radioactive, or the locus of a reverse magnetic force field; no one could seem to come near her. Boys sniggered uneasily at the sight of her; girls folded into groups from which her three best friends gazed at her helplessly, passengers through the windows of a train she had missed by one minute. No one else would look at her, but never had they been so aware, so keenly aware of her presence—it sent a tremor through their ranks that Charlotte could practically hear. But what had she done? She asked herself that question throughout the day, and after school, when her toxicity had abated to a point where her three best friends could approach, she’d told them what happened and put the question to them: what had she done wrong? Two of them were sleeping with their boyfriends—how was this different? No one seemed to know.

  “Next time, don’t do it unless you’re in love,” said Laurel, now the sole remaining virgin in their quartet.

  “I was in love,” Charlotte said.

  After that, Scott laughed when she passed him in the hall—limping from his wounds, on crutches for two weeks with an Ace bandage around his foot until torn knee ligaments sidelined him for good. As long as he was with other boys, he laughed, but if it was just the two of them in the hall, he turned his face away. He was afraid of her, Charlotte saw this clearly.

  Later, she came to understand that her mistake had been largely one of timing. By the end of sophomore year, she regularly heard girls talk of jumping the bones of boys they liked with no mention of love. And yet a taint still clung to Charlotte. She was seen as odd, perverse. Of course, had she been pretty—had she looked like her mother, for instance—the situation would have been different. Charlotte understood this with a deep, angry ache: There were two worlds, and in one of them, everything was harder. No one came to you, and if you went to them, you were likely to be punished for it.

  Of course she was changing schools. To escape from the people who knew her. To vacate a world where the slot she’d been allotted felt minuscule.

  Now, in the car, she said, “Mom, I think I’m going to add a new fish.”

  “What kind?” her mother asked, but Charlotte heard her distraction—they were late to meet Moose—and didn’t bother answering.

  Moose and his second wife, Priscilla, were already seated in the vast carpeted dining room at a corner table overlooking the Rock River. The Rockford Country Club was poised on a bluff directly across from Shore-wood Park, where Charlotte had stopped to watch the water-skiers this afternoon. The bleachers and water-ski jump were still visible just beyond Moose’s shoulder in the blue twilight. As always, Moose sat sideways, disliking to face the room head-on but disliking equally the vulnerability of having his back to it.


  “Moose!” Harris shouted, offering his hand and then stepping back quickly as Moose rose from his chair. “What’re you drinking there? Martini? Why not? Darling, what can I get you? Kids?” He barked the drink orders at the waitress, a college girl home for summer vacation, then heard himself and sat down, abashed. Moose awakened in Harris a manic desire to seize control, as if he were trying desperately to stave off some communal embarrassment.

  “How’s work, Harris?” Moose asked in his curious monotone, when everyone was seated.

  “Can’t complain. You?”

  “Good,” Moose affirmed, nodding slowly. “Very good.”

  Harris noted, with some satisfaction, that his brother-in-law looked like hell. Still handsome, yes (he grudgingly allowed), in a heavy-browed, almost adolescent way that invoked his mythological past, which Ellen still cherished. But Moose’s eyes were dull, as if he were asleep behind them. His shirt was wrinkled, his hair a mess, and he managed the unlikely feat of looking bloated and deflated simultaneously. Yet for all that, he retained a certain kingliness, an orb of superiority that girded him even now, in his disgrace. Harris found this exasperating.

  “What happened with the Kool-Aid wine coolers?” Priscilla asked Harris. She was a nurse at Rockford Memorial, a slender woman whose cropped hair and delicate face would have counted as gamine in New York or Paris, but in Rockford were thought to be tomboyish, odd.

  “Tested badly,” Harris said. “People thought it was trying to sell booze to kids.”

  “Imagine!” Priscilla said, with an impish widening of eyes.

  “We get paid either way.” Harris spoke this wearily. He’d given up trying to explain that he had no vested interest in the products his firm, Demographics in America, tested on Rockford’s consummately American population. No one believed him.

  “Dad, tell about the cereal,” Charlotte said.

  “That’s a strange one,” Harris said, forcing a laugh. “Turns out breakfast cereal treated with trace amounts of radioactivity—completely harmless, apparently—has the property of glowing just slightly.” He noticed Ellen wasn’t listening, and finished quickly. “They want to find out if the stigma of radioactivity is too much, or if parents will let their kids eat the stuff.”