Look at Me

by Jennifer Egan

  He wore a small amber bead around his neck on a leather string. Charlotte adored the smell of that leather, sharp, dense; it smelled like far away, as far from Rockford as you could go. The other side of the world, wherever that was.

  The jingle of Melanie’s bracelets had ceased; she was gone, the halls were emptying, the bell was about to ring. For whole minutes, Charlotte had just been standing there, staring into her locker. Now she yanked out her books, promising herself, If I shut the door before the bell rings, then he loves me. She slammed the door a half-second ahead of the bell, and sprang down the hall to class.

  After dropping Ricky at school, Ellen commenced her morning rounds, picking things up, straightening. Ricky’s shoes—he must have five pairs of identical (to her eye) skateboarding shoes—crumpled socks by the front door. A red baseball cap. She lifted a T-shirt from the banister and inhaled his tart, childish sweat. And here came one of the telescopic moments, a moment when she glimpsed herself from some future point when her son would, or would not, still be alive. Yes or no? Preoccupied, Ellen sank onto the stairs. Silence. Crows. There was a phone call she wanted to make, but no.

  She rose from the steps feeling slightly renewed, as if she’d sloughed off a layer of fear that would take time—hours, days—to replenish. In the master bedroom she made the bed and hung up wet towels and wiped the sinks, then traversed the hall, poking her head into the children’s rooms, pleased to find their beds made. In Charlotte’s room she raised the shades—her daughter liked darkness and artificial light, a difference between them (one of thousands). Ellen peered with apprehension into the fish tank. Saltwater was alive, Charlotte had explained; it could sustain only so much additional life, so the tank hung always in a precarious balance. Each time Ellen looked, she expected to find something dead, but she hadn’t yet. Charlotte knew what she was doing. In this as in everything.

  To justify her lingering presence, Ellen wiped the windowsills and opened Charlotte’s closet, scanning the neat, paltry array of clothes. Her daughter would not be taken shopping. A teenage girl—who had ever heard of that? It made Ellen bitter; she had thirsted for such offers as a girl, but her mother was always too weak, too sick. Last time Ellen had managed to coax Charlotte into Saks, her daughter had made her wait far away from the dressing rooms, then handed her the clothes she wanted brusquely, without consultation. Ellen hadn’t even told Harris; he would have been livid.

  She slid open the drawers of Charlotte’s desk, taking furtive glances at the sharpened pencils, the erasers shaped like fish, alert for clues to the inner life of her composed and opaque daughter, whom she half feared. By the computer, a stack of old books: Winnipeg: A Social History of Urban Growth (Christ, Ellen thought, why not just call it, “The Most Boring Book in the World”?). Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis. American Locomotives: An Engineering History. Was there some rule that every title had to have a colon in it? She opened Charlotte’s dresser drawers. Sweaters, neatly folded. Socks. Nothing hidden underneath but the flats of cedar Ellen had given her to fend off moths. Stickers of frogs pasted to the phone. On the wall, a vast chart of weird-looking fish from Lake Victoria. Ellen had peeked into rooms of her friends’ teenage daughters and been staggered by their riotous cargoes of heart-shaped metallic balloons and feathers and grinning fuzzy Polaroids and spangled hats and pressed corsages from school dances, the candied reek of perfume, posters of love objects always within kissing range; compost heaps of self-expression, self-absorption. But Charlotte’s room was a mask, a surface picked clean of anything suggestive.

  Yet even so, Ellen knew that something was happening to her daughter. She felt it when Charlotte was near and she felt it now, beneath the surface of this room. She knew. Something was happening.

  She heard the distant dryer buzz and headed downstairs to welcome the laundry that gushed from that machine. Before Ricky’s illness, she’d been finishing her B.A. at Winnebago College, spurred in part by the hope of seeing Moose, meeting him for lunch on the campus, though in a whole year they had done that only twice. Still, she’d loved being back in school. Her favorite course was “Enlightened Wanderers,” where they’d read accounts by historic travelers, Marco Polo and the famous fifteenth-century Portuguese sailors, others she’d never heard of: Hsuan-Tsang, a Chinese Buddhist monk who spent sixteen years in India in the 600s. Mary Kingsley, who’d fallen into an animal trap in West Africa and been buffered from nine impaling spikes by the Victorian thickness of her skirt. And Ellen had felt like one of them, an enlightened wanderer herself, embarked as she had been on her own exotic adventure.

  But that was over. Long over, the affair that had injected her life with such promise, the affair that had included lovemaking in this very laundry room; Ellen turned now to look, as if some afterglow might cling to the place where she and Gordon had stood (stood!), some holographic trace. For months she had avoided washing the bra she’d worn on what had proved to be their last encounter, clawed through the laundry basket and pried it free to preserve some remnant of that smell—the smell of him, of them together. Now she climbed the stairs with her Matterhorn of folded whites and flicked off the light, both machines refilled and chomping. It had started at a dinner party in Gordon’s house, a memory Ellen hoarded, allowing it to open only rarely, at special times, like a music box whose tune fades imperceptibly with each playing: herself standing by a windowsill crowded with African violets, looking out at the yard. Gordon touching the small of her back and saying very softly, close to her ear, “I think about you constantly.”

  Ellen had never repeated that phrase to Dr. Alwyn in therapy because she knew how cheap it would sound, and refused to hear it that way. At the time, the words had ricocheted through her like a box of marbles flung against a wall, had initiated nearly a year of surreal, pornographic encounters in locations that only rarely featured beds, and then only guestroom beds; she and Gordon were both too squeamish to offer up their connubial beds or the beds of their offspring for such purposes, though Gordon had once dropped to his knees and brought her to orgasm inside her bedroom closet. And yes, he had made her happy, or rather, the agony of guilt and eroticism he’d brought to her life had given it a new, exquisite focus. God, how she’d loved his ass, Dr. Gordon Weeks. Father of four.

  In the kitchen, Ellen set the basket of laundry on the table and fished for the pack of Kools she kept deep inside a drawer among pencils and matchbooks so she could claim they were old, if Harris found them. She went outside the back door and smoked one standing up—it was too cold to sit on the patio chairs. November, these dark days. And then Ricky got sick and everything changed. She hadn’t seen Gordon since then—or rather, she’d seen him innumerable times at school events, at club tournaments in which he and Harris both golfed, but during that fleck of time in which her life had reversed itself, sitting in a pale blue office in the hematology-oncology ward of Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago, a new agony had commenced in which Ellen became convinced that her badness with Gordon—their badness together—had made Ricky sick. If she hadn’t had the affair, her child would be well, not “well” in the way he was now, well-for-the-moment-and-you-should-thank-God-even-for-that; her child would be untouched. Ellen believed this.

  She lit a second cigarette, narrowing her eyes at the lawn, the very same lawn where she’d played as a child. Here she was, at thirty-six; with the brutal efficiency of a Greek tragedy she’d been thrust into the very life she had sought to escape. Ellen had dragged Harris back to Rockford—true, true—when the children were young, Ricky just a baby. She’d done it for Moose, to be near him after his unspeakable disaster. But Moose, it soon became clear, didn’t like to be near Ellen anymore. For years, she’d made regular detours in the course of her days to look for her brother’s car, tracking his movements from the college to Versailles to the public library. It had relieved her, somehow, just to know where he was. But nowadays she rarely did that. Almost never.

  Yet still she was shackled to Rockford. Harris
refused to leave—couldn’t, he said, his business was thriving and Rockford is my business. Harris wouldn’t leave and Ellen couldn’t leave Harris, not until Ricky was grown up and unquestionably healthy, or the stress could make him sick again. Paralysis: her punishment. Ellen half welcomed it.

  She finished the cigarette, then brought both butts indoors and dropped them into the garbage disposal, grinding them until the faint smell of crushed nicotine had dispersed, then washed her hands with scented soap (Harris was a bloodhound), went to the kitchen phone and lifted the receiver once again.

  For here was the diabolical thing: in the months since Ricky’s chemo finally ended, Ellen had found herself longing again for Gordon, longing to begin it all again, to start from the beginning and feel that thrill, that childlike sense of escape. There was so much to escape from! There had never been a “breakup” per se; Gordon had understood implicitly when she’d said, “My son has,” said it into the telephone, not even lowering her voice. Now she lifted the phone. Her heart clunked. She knew his numbers still, home, office, pager, knew his schedule by heart.

  But she didn’t call Gordon. She called Moose instead.

  Holding her lunch tray, Charlotte threaded among the tables past Melanie Trier, who called out, “Hey, Chari, sit with us.” It was the kind of girl she was. So Charlotte perched at a table lined with football players’ girlfriends and the players themselves, some of whom needed two trays to hold the staggering quantities of food their bodies required (Charlotte counted nine glasses of milk on one). She joined in their prognostications about the game, how the other quarterback was a head case so it was just a matter of wigging him out, saying something weird (How about a riddle? Charlotte suggested), yeah, or like maybe a poem … she half listened, her mind on two tracks. Certain words emanated a new significance: “night,” “teacher,” “foreign,” even “math,” and Charlotte looked for ways to say these words because each utterance gave her a bowelly pinch of pleasure, like plucking a string.

  Now the words “kitchen counter” were rising in her throat, demanding to be said. “We’re having our kitchen counters redone,” she blurted to Melanie, and knew, from her friend’s blank response, that this had been a mistake. She was becoming a girl who muttered odd things in the lunchroom. Yet saying the words made her heart spin.

  Tor turned his big, delicate face to Melanie and kissed her. The bracelets chattered on her wrists. And again the question rose in Charlotte: If this was love, did she have it too? Did you need to say “love” for it to be love? Michael hadn’t said “love” except once, about her lotion. His gaze felt so empty; he seemed to rest his eyes on Charlotte but see something else, or see nothing. After they’d done it, she would turn to him and place a hand on his stomach (he was so thin, thinner than he looked in clothes), feeling the sheathe of muscle behind his skin, and try to guess his thoughts. She wanted to ask, Do you feel the link of fate that connects us? Do you think about me during the day, like I think about you? Do you wish I came to your house on nights when I don’t come? Do you prefer small-breasted women, which you told me some men do? But instinct kept her from asking any of these things, lest his answers be wrong. “I should go home,” she would say instead, and pull on her clothes in the dark.

  “Chari’s coming to the game,” Melanie told Tor, having apparently forgotten that she wasn’t.

  “Cool,” Tor said, and Charlotte felt the adjustment of his gray eyes as he envisioned her beside the field, watching him.

  “Positive thoughts,” Melanie said.

  “Positive thoughts,” Charlotte agreed.

  Kitchen counters, she was thinking.

  Moose leapt from his living room couch, which was covered with maps of Rockford, and lunged for the telephone, anxious that it not wake Priscilla, who had worked the night before and was asleep in the bedroom.

  “Ellen,” he said, surprised; he and his sister rarely spoke. “Is everything all right?”

  “Oh, fine,” she said, sounding nervous. “I—I was calling to talk about Charlotte.”

  “Oh,” Moose said. And then, very slowly, “What. About. Her?”

  He spoke with utmost care, because the invocation of Charlotte caused a black umbrella of guilt to open inside him: guilt over the sense of obligation that dragged at him when he thought of his niece. Some weeks ago he had set her free in the woods behind Winnebago College, yet in no time at all she was back, essay in hand, and the surprise of her unwonted reappearance had spurred in Moose his first real irritation with Charlotte: How long did this have to go on? When would he be free of the obligation? What could—

  “Moose?”

  He was on the phone. Talking to his sister. About Charlotte.

  “… can’t get a word out of her …,” Ellen was saying.

  “Hmmm,” Moose said, and closed his eyes, forcing himself to concentrate.

  “It could be nothing, but I have this sense that …”

  “Hmmm.”

  “… she’s in the grip of something.”

  This got his attention. Moose opened his eyes.

  “And I thought you might, since you see her regularly, you might have …”

  “Grip of what?” he asked.

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  Moose fixed his eyes on the sliding glass door, beyond which lay his small balcony, the autumnal grounds of Versailles, Rockford, Illinois, and the world, whose immensity the glass door thus synechdochally invoked. In his years of teaching, there had been five or six students who had seemed, if only briefly, only partially, to be edging toward something that might have been a first, glimmering suggestion of the vision he wished to impart. For Moose, the experience of their proximity had been a sweet agony whose nearest analog was love, a love more coiled and hopeful and desperate than any he had known in his amorous life. Male or female, it made no difference. Had Moose been told, at such a time, of such a student, that said student was in the grip of something, he would have experienced a catastrophic excitement. But Charlotte was not such a student, nor faintly reminiscent of one. Even those more promising kids had never really seen it; they had graduated from the college and drifted away into the service industries, and occasionally Moose would glimpse one hauling children through Media Play or buying soil at Home Depot, at which point he hid himself urgently, flailingly, ducking behind racks of lawn mowers, lunging around walls of frozen food, desperate to avoid the mundane and mortifying aftermath of his hope.

  Still. In the grip of something. It intrigued him.

  “I’ll watch her, Ellen,” Moose promised. “I’ll look very carefully today, this afternoon. She’s coming to my office at four.”

  “Thanks, Moose.”

  There was a pause. “And how are you?” he asked.

  “Not bad.”

  Moose heard a falter in his sister’s voice, and was moved to declare with feeling, “It’s good to talk to you, Ellen,” meaning it despite the labyrinth of discomfort that had interposed itself between them, a hangover from so much time spent together long ago, when he was someone else. He felt a deep, awful tenderness for his little sister.

  “Thanks,” she said shyly. “Same.”

  And Moose heard her happiness then—Oh, the joy that came of dispensing happiness to others, of entering happiness’s interlocking circuitry! Yet even now Moose felt the persistence of whatever worry he’d heard in Ellen’s voice before the happiness his remark had occasioned, and no sooner was the phone back in its cradle than he was felled by a crash of despair on his sister’s behalf. We’re all alone, he thought, crumpling back onto the fragment of living room couch that wasn’t draped in maps of Rockford. We are all alone.

  After several minutes of gloomy reverie, Moose was distracted by the sound of Priscilla turning over in bed, a sound that induced in him a twang of good luck at being married to someone who could sleep until—he glanced at his watch—ten-forty-five on her days off, who slept as if sleeping were a sport. He left the couch and went to look at his wife. She wa
s dozing, her hand in a book, a trill of lavender visible above the bedclothes, one of the silken undergarments that tangled around her in bed and around Moose, too, who slept in the nude. They smelled like flowers. Before Priscilla, he’d hated to sleep because of the nightmares—closing his eyes was like jumping off a cliff—but sleeping with her was like slipping into a warm sea and floating there, the nighties coiling like sea anemones around his wrists and ankles.

  Priscilla opened her eyes, saw Moose in the doorway and held out her arms. He lay down beside her, mute while she kissed his face, his big strange face that appeared monstrous to him in the mirror sometimes, filled with hues a face should not have—green, purple, chartreuse—kissed him and said, “How’s it going, silly?” and he said, “Okay,” which seemed the most accurate summary he could muster of the gusts of happiness and unhappiness that had buffeted him so far that morning.

  “Are you working?” she asked.

  “Sort of.”

  “I’m reading Moll Flanders,” she said, sleepily.

  “So I saw,” he teased. “With your eyes closed.”

  She smiled and rose from the bed, slender legs still brown under the short hem of her lavender chemise, though it had been months since she’d lain on the balcony in her bikini. Moose followed her into the kitchen.

  “You were tired last night,” he said.

  “Ugh, it was craziness. Not to mention we were short-staffed—Andy took another sick day.”

  “The dolt,” Moose muttered.

  “Meanwhile, I’m starving,” Priscilla said. She was adding milk and eggs to powdered pancake mix, blending it all with a large metal whisk. She always ate pancakes or waffles or French toast on her days off, yet she stayed thin—lissome, even. “Want to hand me that pan?”

  “I’ve got it.” Moose buttered the pan and placed it over the burner. Then he gathered Priscilla into his arms, enfolding his slender wife in his gigantic embrace, inhaling the light, peppery smell of her underarms.