Saint X (ARC)

by Alexis Schaitkin

  “Really?”

  “We didn’t have a lot of ice growing up, miss.”

  “Right, I’m sorry. That was stupid. We used to skate all winter long, as soon as the Wabash froze over. I remember my feet would turn so numb that when I took off my skates I’d cry.” (Truths nested in lies nested in truths. The pain of numb toes warming after skating—a memory as visceral as any from my childhood. But the Wabash River? A strip of blue cellophane in my fourth-grade diorama.) “All the kids from my neighborhood would be playing some game together on the ice, and I was always just skating by myself off to the side. It was like I couldn’t figure it out somehow. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever really had a best friend?”

  “Me, neither.”

  TONIGHT WAS my senior dance recital. I’ve been practicing for months. I choreographed the dance myself. I probably spent a hundred hours practicing. But as soon as I stepped onto the stage and went up for my first pirouette, I knew I would fall short. It was like it had already happened and there was nothing I could do about it.

  I danced and it was fine. I didn’t mess up or anything, but I wasn’t inside the music the way I wanted to be. When the recital was over I put on my sweats and went out to the lobby and there’s twenty people giving me flowers and accosting me with praise. “Oh my god, Alison, you’re so amazing.” “You’re so talented.” “That was so great.” Blah blah blah fanfuckingtastic.

  Are most people so insensitive to what’s going on that it all looks the same to them? I mean, how did everybody totally miss what actually happened tonight? I didn’t make a single mistake, not one, and I still completely failed.

  Flowers and white teeth. This was my image of my sister, taken from this very recital. She had seemed to float with happiness that night. What a shock to learn that she had in fact been seething with self-criticism and hostility. How well she had hidden it! I had not thought my sister capable of such deep dissatisfaction.

  I FLEW to Pasadena for Thanksgiving. I resented this disruption to the progress I was making with Clive, but could see no way around it. It was the same small gathering as always: me, my parents, Aunt Caroline, and a man my mother referred to, in a tone that managed to sound simultaneously empty of and loaded with judgment, as “the flavor of the month.” This time he was an acupuncturist of Argentine extraction. Aunt Caroline was in her mid-sixties and skinnier than ever, her lips plumped to the edge of tastefulness with Restylane. The acupuncturist looked to be about forty-five. Aunt Caroline had been dating forty-five-year-old men since she was twenty and it seemed she had no plans of stopping now.

  Before the meal we assumed our usual positions, my mother and me in the kitchen, Aunt Caroline, the boyfriend, and my father chatting in the living room. (“I promise I’ll stay out from underfoot,” Aunt Caroline said to my mother, as if she were doing her a favor by sitting on the couch getting tipsy on Cab Franc.) At the dinner table, things proceeded the same as always.

  “The garden is looking magnificent. What’s your secret?” Aunt Caroline asked my father, who launched into an animated discourse on his approaches to fertilizing, pruning, watering, pest control.

  “And what’s new with you, darling?” Aunt Caroline asked, leaning toward me.

  Before I even had time to concoct a convincing reply, my father chimed in. “Em’s getting into yoga.”

  “How fabulous!” Aunt Caroline said. “I have a friend who swears she grew two inches when she started practicing yoga.”

  “It’s fantastic for your alignment,” my father said. “And it transforms the way your body processes carbon dioxide.”

  “Is that right?” my mother asked.

  “NPR,” my father shrugged.

  The conversation moved on to other subjects—the California proposition that had just passed overwhelmingly, the consulting project my father had picked up in his retirement, the dash of fish sauce my mother had added to the roasted Brussels sprouts this year, the half marathon in Huntington Beach my father had registered for and the nagging knee injury that would likely prevent him from running it.

  As the meal progressed, its mundanity began to feel increasingly phantasmagoric. How was it possible they didn’t realize something was happening to me? The conversation continued—my mother couldn’t take this new contingent that had joined her book club, they never read the books, she was honestly considering defecting. I clenched my fists under the table, digging my fingernails into my palms. This, I now saw, was exactly how our family had maintained itself since Alison’s death, by not squinting too closely at one another, not knowing one another too well.

  As soon as we’d finished the pie, I announced that I was feeling terribly jet-lagged and headed to bed early, though I lay awake much of the night, staring out the window at my father’s violets, which held perfectly still in the dry, windless dark.

  ON SATURDAY morning I woke up early. Aunt Caroline and her boyfriend had flown home the night before. My flight to JFK wasn’t until the afternoon. I found my mother in the kitchen.

  “Coffee?” she asked, already opening the cabinet and reaching for a mug.

  “No.”

  “Oh. Tea? Orange juice?”

  I shook my head.

  “How about some breakfast? I can make eggs?”

  “Stop, Mom. I don’t want anything.”

  I went to the dishwasher and began unloading the bowls.

  She put a hand on my shoulder. “You spoil me.”

  I shrugged her off. She winced and shrank back from me with a wounded expression. Suddenly I felt nothing but revulsion for this fragile bird of a woman, my mother. I wanted to hurt her, and not like I just had, not with some minor daughterly rudeness, but to really hurt her, in a way she could not evade or dismiss.

  “Do you remember Alison’s last dance recital?” I asked.

  She looked down at the floor. As a family, we were not in the habit of bringing up Alison without warning. I kept going. “The one where she danced to—”

  My mother hummed a few bars of the song, then laughed quietly at herself. “Your sister was so beautiful that night.” My mother never said her name.

  “She hated it.”

  “Hated what, darling?”

  “That whole night. Everything about it.”

  “What are you talking about, sweetie? She was on cloud nine.”

  “You’re wrong. She was furious.”

  My mother hugged herself as if the room had grown cold. “You listened.”

  “How would you know? You said you stopped after a few minutes.”

  My mother held my gaze.

  “You listened, too.”

  “Years ago. You were in college and your father was away on business for the week. I just—”

  “Couldn’t help it.”

  She nodded.

  “Then you know what I’m talking about. You know how upset she was that night.”

  My mother sighed. “I know that’s what she said, sweetheart. But I was there. I saw her. She was so happy.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “All I can say is I know what I saw.”

  I gritted my teeth. It was so like her, this aloof denial of an unpleasant truth.

  “Honey, what was that?”

  I stuffed my hand in my pocket. “What was what?”

  “Your hand. I thought I saw…”

  “An itch.”

  Strange, how something can lie dormant in you for years, so long you forget about it, and then it’s back like it never left. It had been happening for a few weeks now, the need growing more difficult to suppress—words prickling in my fingertips, desperate to get out. S-o h-a-p-p-y.

  “Sweetheart, are you getting enough fresh air?”

  Fresh air? Fanfuckingtastic.

  IT’S TEMPTING to paint my nighttime meetings with Clive retroactively with a shiny gloss, to suggest that after a while we achieved an easy rapport, and I want to be careful not to mislead in that way. Even after we’d spent hours together, our conversatio
ns remained stilted. Clive often gave only the most perfunctory answers to my questions before falling silent for long stretches. There was one topic, though, that he seemed truly to relish, and that was his job as a hack and the things he had seen, the stories he had to tell. He told me about the crazy conversations he’d overheard. The time someone left a two-hundred-dollar tip on a ten-buck ride. Getting held up in the nineties.

  “I had a man once who started talking to himself,” he began one evening. “He was talking about a heist he was going to execute with a partner. He said, ‘Here’s the plan. I’ll go up to the teller, I’ll show her the gun and tell her she has twenty seconds. When I put my hand in my pocket, you get the customers down on the ground.’ He kept going like this, how they will get into the vault and what they will retrieve from it and where the getaway car will be parked. I began to worry that perhaps I was the getaway car. I was thinking about how I might drive to a police station without him realizing where we were going when he said, ‘So? How did I do?’ He was an actor. It was opening night of his first off-Broadway play.”

  “No.”

  “It’s true.” He grinned. “I’ve also driven three women in labor to the hospital, one of them in a blizzard. She told me she would name her child after me. I remember when I told my son that he said, ‘But what if she had a girl?’ If you ever meet a Clivette, I guess she has me to thank.”

  “You have a son?”

  He appeared flustered, as if he hadn’t meant to reveal this. He nodded. “He’ll be turning twenty-one soon.”

  “He lives here?”

  “Oh, no, no. He’s back home, back—with his mother.”

  “Your wife?”

  He shook his head. “She was a difficult woman. Troubled.”

  “Are you and your son close?”

  He broke off small tatters from the napkin in his fist and collected them in a pile on the table. “I tried at first. She didn’t permit me to be involved.” He cleared his throat. “Here’s another story for you: Would you believe I once picked up Mike Piazza two hours before a home game? His driver was stuck on the Bruckner. It was just after 9/11 and traffic was very bad. I got him to Shea just in time.”

  Clive had spoken the words “my son” like a kiss to a warm forehead. I hadn’t known he had a child. If the boy was twenty now, then he had been two or three years old when Alison was killed. Bile rose in my throat. Clive had been a father when it happened. He should have looked at Alison and seen someone’s child, not whatever she was to him instead: A way of injecting excitement into a life saddled with a kid and responsibilities he wasn’t ready for? The unlucky victim of a man’s anger toward another woman, a “difficult” woman? Had Alison known Clive had a son? As Edwin Hastie slid a cigarette between her lips in the sandy staff parking lot, had Clive told some precious story about his toddler, and had this story made her think these men sweet and safe?

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s amazing.”

  “Only in New York. Before he got out I told him, Mike, I have a confession. Usually I’m a Yankee fan. But tonight I’m rooting for the Mets.”

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY to me. Woo-hoo. Today, old lady Alison, you are sixteen years old.

  So I can drive now. Very exciting, blah blah blah. For my birthday my parents got me … drumroll, please … a new car!

  That’s right, my dad bought me a brand-spanking-new Audi. So inevitably we had a big fight about it. I wanted a used car. Something low-key. Because, come on. I’m sixteen. Why on earth should I own a brand-new Swedish or German or whatever … why should I have this luxury car that I’m inevitably going to fuck up because I just started driving and, news flash, I don’t know how yet? When I told him that, he was all, “That’s exactly why we want you to have a good, safe car.”

  I mean, he’s right. On the one hand, I completely understand why if you could afford it you would buy the best car you can for your kid. On the other hand, I’m mortified. Not just for me. For my friends, too. On behalf of my friends, especially the ones who are, like, super-excited about their new luxury vehicles and see no issue here whatsoever. We’re teenagers and people are just giving us these ridiculously nice cars. We should be embarrassed, right?

  But being embarrassed only makes it worse, because if you’re lucky enough to be given a nice, safe, fancy-schmancy car, isn’t it brattier to yell at your dad about it than to just be glad you have it? But then—I feel like there’s this really slippery slope between being glad you have something and thinking you deserve it.

  WHEN MY mother had told me that, despite what Alison said in her diary, she was certain my sister had been on cloud nine at her last dance recital, I’d thought she was sticking her head in the sand. But the more I listened to Alison’s diary, the more I began to wonder whether it could be trusted. I began to detect a self-conscious, performative aspect in the things she said. Take Alison’s insistence that she did not want the new car my parents gave her. Are we really to believe that she did not, on some level, want it? Are we really going to accept that she didn’t enjoy having it? Isn’t it more likely that she loved the car—its new-car aroma, its elasticity around a sharp bend, its blue gleam in the school parking lot—but that her own materiality embarrassed her, or she thought it ought to—that she knew a purer person would be embarrassed by it, and she wished to believe she was such a person? Isn’t it more likely that the extended diatribe on the subject that she recorded in the diary was an attempt to reassure herself of her own virtue?

  Or let’s return to the recital. What if my mother was right and Alison was simply giddy eating up compliments after her performance? That’s how I remember it, too. You can see how a diary might become a useful tool, how it might be used to rewrite history, to recast the pivotal moments of one’s life to suggest a humbler, more critical self.

  At the same time, the urgency and raw emotion in Alison’s words were unmistakable, her turmoil palpable. She was grappling with herself. I believe that. Alison at least meant to be honest with herself. Here we run up against yet another problem—the obstacle of her youth. How much does a girl of fifteen or sixteen really understand about herself? How accurate can she possibly be?

  The diary was a slippery thing, weaving together confession with self-delusion, truth with distortion. No—the weaving metaphor isn’t right. That suggests truth and distortion are strands and, therefore, separable. I think it would be more accurate to say that truth and untruth were present in Alison’s diary as hydrogen and oxygen are present in water. The challenge is not one of separation—for what use are either hydrogen or oxygen in understanding the nature of water?—but of understanding these moments without attempting to separate them. I had to find a way to understand how truth and untruth make each other.

  ONE DAY at work, a Facebook invitation appeared in my inbox. Jackie was throwing herself a birthday party: dinner at an all-you-can-eat-and-drink sushi and sake joint, followed by karaoke in Koreatown. I could no longer imagine attending such an event. How frivolous to be twenty-five and doing sake bombs, what a joke, what a cliché. What a cliché, even, to possess some ironic relationship to your own clichéd birthday party, as Jackie did, to affect a pose of self-mockery toward oneself and the basic things one loved. (Yes, we’re doing this. Bon Jovi non-negotiable, the invite said.)

  Before I set out for the Little Sweet on the night of Jackie’s party, I texted her: Sorry, I have a thing tonight, but have so much fun!

  Jackie texted back immediately: You’re bailing on my bday?!? Is everything okay??? I’m worried.

  Her worry opened something in me. For a moment I wanted to go to Jackie’s party and have stupid fun there the way I would have just a few short months ago, but I knew I couldn’t; it was simply no longer possible for me to get wasted and eat bargain-basement spicy tuna rolls and belt out “Sweet Caroline” like these things were somehow relevant to me, and there was loss in this, too. Briefly I considered telling Jackie everything. I typed and deleted half a dozen messages, but in the end, I gav
e up. I never replied.

  I BEGAN sleeping less and less, and erratically. Night after night, through the dark hours, I listened to Alison. I had not experienced insomnia like this since I was a child, churning out fatal scenarios in the darkness, and the feeling now was familiar: I wanted to stop listening, to give myself over to sleep, but I couldn’t. To press stop, to extinguish Alison’s voice, seemed dangerous in a way I cannot explain rationally, but which felt absolutely inviolable to me. I was almost grateful when the man above me began his nightly guitar practice at two A.M., the music sifting down through my ceiling providing an alternate and utterly ordinary explanation for my wakefulness. For the first time in my life, I was sleeping through my alarm and arriving late to work.

  I JUST got back from a trip to Becca’s ski house. First of all, the trip was a freaking blast. I seriously think I have a six-pack from cracking up so much. I feel like I’ve been really, I don’t know, blah lately, and this trip made me remember that I really, really love my friends. A few highlights: Matt and Andy losing a bet and streaking across the yard in the freezing cold. Staying in the hot tub for hours drinking beer and talking. Getting ridiculously stoned one night and taking all the blankets onto the deck and lying there looking up at the stars while it snowed. After a while I couldn’t even tell if the snow was falling or the stars, it was just this beautiful mess. High stargazing is seriously the best.

  Did I mention I broke my wrist? True story. It happened on the last day, otherwise the trip would have been a total bust. I fell coming off a big jump. Everybody else was in the lodge for a hot-cocoa break, and I went off on my own to get in one more run. I had a three-seater to myself on the chairlift. You know how sometimes the world just rips open and you find yourself in a moment that is totally sacred? This was that. The trees high up on the slope were coated in snow and glittering. The snow had that bluish glow, and it was like it was all here for me. I actually started to cry because I just felt so moved. I was still in that energy when I decided to take this jump on the way down. There was that moment when I was hanging in the air, that weightless, almost-flying moment when you start to realize your body is no longer under your control, then splat.