Battleborn: Stories

RONDINE AL NIDO

She will be thirty when she walks out on a man who in the end, she’ll decide, didn’t love her enough, though he in fact did love her, but his love wrenched something inside him, and this caused him to hurt her. She’ll move to an apartment downtown and soon—very soon, people will say, admiringly at times, skeptically at others—she will have a date with a sensible man working as an attorney, the profession of his father and brothers, in the office where she is a typist. They will share a dinner, and the next weekend another, then drinks, a midday walk through the upheaved brick sidewalks of her neighborhood, a Sunday-morning garden tour of his. On their fifth date she will allow him to take her to bed.

Before they met, he’ll have been a social worker, and after they make love he will tell her this, and about the terrible things he saw in that other life. He’ll begin—At CPS, there was this woman. She had this little girl. Beautiful. Two years old—then stop and lean down and put his lips to her hair. Do you really want to hear this? he’ll ask, as though just remembering that she was listening. He’ll feel her head nod where it rests on his chest and go on. About the Mexican woman who let her beautiful, bright two-year-old daughter starve to death in a motel room near the freeway. About the teenage boy, high on coke, who broke into the apartment next door and slit his neighbor’s throat. About the man who worked at the snack bar at the Sparks Marina, who lured a retarded girl into the men’s bathroom with a lemonade. About the father who made his son live under their porch in Sun Valley, about the hole the boy bored up through the floor so he could watch his stepmother brush her hair in the morning.

He will talk, and she will listen. It will be as though she’s finally found someone else willing to see the worst in the world. Someone who can’t help but see it. For the first time in her life, she will feel understood. When he finishes one story she’ll ask for another, then another, wanting to stack them like bricks, build walls of sorrow around the two of them, seal them up together. An uncontrollable feeling—like falling—will be growing in her: they could build a love this way.

Then, feigning lightness, she’ll ask him to tell her about something he did, something terrible. When he was a boy, maybe. It will be late. Watery light from a waxing moon will catch the corner of the bed, setting the white sheets aglow. Two candles—the man’s idea—will flicker feebly on the nightstand, drawing moths against the window screen. He will tell her about his younger brother and a firecracker and a neighbor’s farmhouse in Chatsworth, of straw insulation and old dry wood that went up like whoosh so fast it didn’t seem fair, of running around to the front door and ringing the bell—she will find this curious, the bell—and helping the neighbor, an elderly woman, down the front steps. Now you show me yours, he’ll say, and laugh. He will have a devastating laugh.

By then, there will be much to tell—too much. A pair of expensive tropical lizards she’d begged for, then abandoned in a field to die when their care became tedious. Birthstone rings and a real gold bracelet plucked from a friend’s jewelry box at a sleepover. Asking an ugly, wretched boy with circles of ringworm strung like little galaxies across his head to meet her for a kiss at the flagpole, laughing wildly when he showed. These she’ll have been carrying since girlhood like very small stones in her pocket. The sensible man will be waiting. Who can say why we offer the parts of ourselves we do, and when.

Our girl is sixteen years old. Her palms press against the stinging metal of a heat rack. Her best friend, Lena, a large-toothed girl from Minnesota, stands across from her, palms pressed against the rack, too. Their eyes are locked, and a skin scent rises between them. This is their game, one of many. In the pocket of our girl’s apron rests a stack of fleshy pepperoni, their edges curling in the swelter. Behind her, the slat-mouthed pizza oven bellows steadily. A blackened sheet of baking parchment floats in a dish of hot grease. The grease has a name, and as our girl tells the story this name will return to her, along with other details of this place, which had until now left her—the flatulent smell from a newly opened bag of sausage, the flimsy yellowed plastic covering the computer keyboards and phone keypads, the serrated edge of a cardboard box slicing her index finger nearly to the bone. Naked in her own bed with a man for whom she feels too much too soon, our girl will recall the name of the grease—Whirl, it was called—and the then-exquisite possibility of searing off her fingerprints.

Lena, her friend, finally pulls her hands from the rack, shaking the sting from them. You win, she says.

Our girl waits a beat, gloating, then lifts her palms from the surface, lustrous with heat. She folds a pepperoni disk into her mouth. Let’s go again, she says.

Soon, our girl is cut loose for the night by the manager, a brick-faced, wire-haired woman named Suzie. She goes to the back of the restaurant, to a bathroom constructed from Sheetrock as an afterthought. At a row of metal sinks outside the bathroom, two delivery boys wash dishes. One of the boys, a nineteen-year-old named Jeremy, has convinced himself that he loves our girl, though she has already once declined an invitation to watch Dawn of the Dead in the single-wide trailer he has all to himself on his mother’s boyfriend’s property.

In the bathroom the plastic shelves are stocked with fluorescent lightbulbs and printer paper and a dozen two-gallon plastic tubs once used to store a cream sauce the franchise no longer offers. She removes her hat, her apron, her once-white tennis shoes and ankle socks. She unpins her name tag from her patriotically colored collared shirt, and pulls the shirt off over her head. Yellow grains of cornmeal sprinkle into her eyelashes and along the part in her hair. She steps out of her khaki pants, stiff with dried doughwater and dark, unidentified oils.

She stands before the mirror in her bra and underwear, listening to the hollow, slow-motion clangs at the triple sinks. She steps out of her underwear. Suzie bellows from up front, and someone’s nonmarking sole screeches against the tile. In the sink, using the granulated pink soap from the dispenser, our girl scrubs the smell of herself from her panties. Later, the dampness left from this washing will remind her of the pizza parlor and of poor pathetic Jeremy the delivery boy, and other remnants of a life she already wishes she could forget.

She waits for Lena on the bench in front of the counter, watching carryout mothers waddle from and to their idling cars with their pizzas and their slippery, foil-wrapped cheese sticks. Six and a half hours ago, in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart across the highway, Kyle Peterson, a tenor sax in their school’s jazz band, dumped Lena, his girlfriend of nearly a year, for the first-chair flutist, a freshman and a thinner, looser version of Lena. Two hours later, our girl wiped mascara from under Lena’s rubbed-raw eyes in the Sheetrock bathroom and asked her whether she wanted to get the fuck out of this shit town. Two hours after that, when she was certain her mother and stepfather had left for their Friday-night twelve-step meeting, our girl dialed her own phone number. She told the machine, I’m going to Lena’s after work to stay the night, and, I love you, which is what she always says after she lies to them. By the time Lena gets off, they’ve both got an uneventful adolescence’s worth of recklessness welling inside them, and one of them has a driver’s license and a like-new Dodge Neon and it’s just the tip of summer, which means there are college boys from places like Chicago and Florida and New York City wandering the Strip, sixty miles away, boys who came to Las Vegas looking for girls willing to do the things she and Lena think they are willing to do.

At eight o’clock Lena changes out of her uniform and wets her hair and underarms at the bathroom sink and then the two walk out into the parking lot with their soiled uniforms balled under their arms, their apron strings trailing along the asphalt, as though they don’t have to be back for tomorrow’s dinner rush, as though they don’t have to be back ever again.

On the road, all there is is desert and night and the taillights of the cars ahead of them. The radio comes in and out. Once, without taking her eyes off the road, Lena says, I should have done it with him. I don’t know why I didn’t. Our girl says nothing, only nods. When Lena swings the Neon around the final curve of the mountain range separating their town from Las Vegas, they see light sweeping across the valley floor like a blanket made of lights, like light is a liquid and the city is a great glistening lake.

Lena sucks a little saliva from her over-large teeth and asks is it okay if they turn the radio off. She has never driven in the city. Our girl says, That’s cool, because the radio is suddenly nothing compared to the billboards and limos and rented convertibles and speakers embedded in the sidewalks emitting their own music into the air, and because she’ll say anything to soothe Lena, to keep her driving.

Our girl directs Lena to park on the top floor of the parking garage at the New York New York. It is June 2001. This is the Las Vegas that has recently given up on becoming what they were calling a family-friendly vacation destination. The waterslides and roller coasters and ice-skating rinks that were once part of the megaresorts have been torn down to make room for additional hotel towers, floor space, and parking garages like this one. Lena pulls hard on the parking brake, the way her mother taught her. She moved from Minnesota her freshman year, when her mom was offered a job as the Nye County health nurse. Her parents have been divorced since before she can remember. She sees her father, an accountant, on Christmas and Easter, and lives with him in St. Paul for five weeks during the summer. Lena doesn’t know anything about what was once Wet ’n’ Wild or MGM Grand Adventures. Our girl spent her birthdays and end-of-year field trips in such places and could be saddened by their vanishing, could consider it the demolition of her childhood. But thoughts like these will not come to her for years.

Lena has a tube of waterproof mascara and a peacock blue eyeliner pencil in her purse. Our girl has vanilla-bean body spray and kiwi-strawberry lip gloss and gum in three different incarnations of mint. All these they trade in the front seat of the Neon until both are eyelined and fragrant and fresh-mouthed. From the parking structure they walk through the New York New York. The shops in the casino are façaded with half-scale fire escapes and newsstands and mailboxes with graffiti replicated on the side. They sell Nathan’s Famous hot dogs or tiny Statue of Liberty erasers and key-chain taxicabs and all varieties of shot glasses.

Our girl leads the way. The floor is busy carpet or plastic cobble. Tacky, her mother would call it, dully. The ceiling is lit to suggest stars glittering at twilight, as is popular along the Strip at this time. A bulbous red glittered apple rotates above a stand of slots. Our girl ignores the directional signs, which point down circuitous routes pitted with pocket bars and sports books. Once, Lena touches her lightly, thinking they’ve lost their way. Our girl says, Trust me, and Lena does.

Outside there is a breeze threading through the warm night and a jubilant honking of cars and all those billions of bulbs flashing in time, signaling to the girls that they are, at long last, alive. Across Las Vegas Boulevard is an enormous gold lion posing regally in the mist of a fountain. The lion is the property’s second; the original—a formidable openmouthed beast forged in midroar—was replaced because it frightened some Chinese tourists and was considered bad luck by others. Down the expansive block is an unimpressive aging Camelot, and beyond that a black glass pyramid, the apex of which emits a thick rope of light supposedly visible from space. The girls set off in the opposite direction, toward an ever-expanding ancient Rome and, across the palm-lined, traffic-clogged boulevard, the Eiffel Tower, where our girl’s stepfather poured concrete during phase two. They cross a Brooklyn Bridge, its waters strewn with coins, and pass before the wood-toothed mouth of a grinning Coney clown that will be demolished long before either girl reveals the happenings of this night to anyone.

The weekend crowds are dense on the sidewalks and mostly foreign or Midwestern. This allows the girls to amuse themselves at intersections by grasping hands, stepping off the curb against a red light, and glancing backward to see the crowd follow in their wake, taxicabs honking wildly. They have a teenage sense of their surroundings: They wander unknowingly into the photos of strangers, and twice Lena tramples the heel of a Japanese tourist walking in front of her. But they feel men and boys before they see them, poking each other in the ribs, perking for button-ups and baseball caps and oversize jerseys, whirling around at the sound of a skateboard.

Soon, propped on the rubber handrail of a down-bound outdoor escalator, our girl stares unblinkingly at a cluster of young men headed in the opposite direction. When they pass, Lena turns and waves to them, but our girl dismounts the escalator coolly and without turning, wielding the fearsome magnetism of ambivalence. When they reach the top, the young men turn and descend the escalator.

The young men outnumber the girls by two. Our girl likes the way the four of them form a slowly closing semicircle around her and her friend. She likes, too, how they all look the same, in their baggy jeans and pastel collared shirts. They are dressed as most boys their age or slightly older dress, as though their tops and bottoms were mismatched pieces from two separate puzzles, one marked boy and the other man. One of them introduces himself as Brad, another as Tom, another Greg, and the last, Allen. Except for Allen, they say these names too often and like candies too large for their mouths—This is Brad. Brad, shake her hand. Don’t be rude, Brad—and because of this it becomes clear to everyone that these are not their real names. Everyone except Lena, who waves and says, Nice to meet you, Brad.

The one who calls himself Tom suggests they walk up to the Bellagio to watch the fountain show. The girls glance at each other and say, Sure, as they do again at the show when one young man—Greg, is it?—offers them a cup of orange soda clandestinely cut with vodka. Lena’s mouth twists as she releases the straw, but our girl urges the straw up to her lips again, and Lena drinks more heartily. They pass the cup back and forth. This is what they came for.

Soon, the industrial fountain spigots emerge from the glassy black surface of the water, and somewhere strings begin to hum. The song is “Rondine al Nido,” which pleases our girl, not because she recognizes it as such—she doesn’t—but because she wants Lena to experience the pure painful awe of the bright-lit Bellagio fountains and she believes this is best conveyed when the cannon blasts are paired with something classical, something like the agony of ill-fated love.

After the show, the boy who calls himself Greg turns to them. He is large, with the overexpressed muscles that come from a university rec center, so unlike the aching, striated parts of a man who works for a living, as our girl’s stepfather would say. Greg asks, How old are you guys?

Old enough, says Lena, and this makes our girl proud.

Greg laughs. We’ll see about that.

The boys ask them more questions—where they live, where they go to school—and meanwhile, one of them replenishes the soda cup. Our girl lies up a city life for them: moves them into adjacent two-story houses near the Galleria Mall, skips them ahead to senior year and enrolls them in a school whose football team once came out and trounced their own.

They drink. They walk. The boys say they go to UCSB, though our girl will misremember it as UCSC, so that in the coming years, these boys and what they do to them will combine with far-off Santa Cruz, California, and years later, lying beside the sensible man with the devastating laugh—the first man she will not see beyond—the boys will have the scent of damp redwood and the sharp angles of that region’s mountain lions, which she once read about.

In her bed, the candles dimming behind her, she will say nothing of these associations. She will be barely aware of them. She’ll tug the top sheet out from under her, absently touch her fingers to the dampness left between her legs, and say, They had a room.

But the sensible man—being who he is—will find the angles in her face. The redwood wet will be in his throat when he asks her, You went there? Alone? You were just a girl.

I had Lena, she’ll say. My friend.

Because he’ll know what’s coming, this will only make it worse.

The boys lead the girls to their hotel, where entering once meant passing through the jaws of a fearsome gold lion and now means nothing. Warm with sugar and liquor, our girl wants badly to tell Lena this—about the original lion and the superstitious Chinese tourists—because tonight’s lion is the only lion Lena has ever known. It seems, for an instant, that if Lena knew about the old lion then at last the miles between Minnesota and Nevada might fold like a sheet, the distance crumpling into closeness, and they would tell each other everything, always.

But the time for telling passes. In its place is the sudden chemical smell of chlorine and a flash of the too-blue water encircling the statue, and then the girls are met with a blast of air-conditioning and stale cigarette smoke and the noise of the machines inside the MGM Grand.

The six of them make their way across the floor, toward the hotel’s two towers. The boy called Tom lays his hand on the back of our girl’s neck. As they pass a security guard standing beside a golden trash can, she is possessed by the impulse to sink her fingers deep into the glittering black sand of the ashtray atop it, but she resists this. Behind her, Lena stumbles, rights herself, then stumbles again. The boy called Brad grips her upper arm. Bitch, be cool, he says through his slick teeth.

Lena walks steadily for several steps, then stops. She has felt his words, more than understood them. She says, I have to pee. Our girl tells Tom, We’ll be right back, and follows her friend to the ladies’ room.

Lena locks herself in the handicapped stall at the far end of the bathroom and sits on the toilet without taking down her pants. Our girl goes into the stall beside Lena’s and shuts the door. She sits on the toilet in the same way. A woman is washing her hands at the sink, and the automatic faucet blasts in spurts. Lena breathes heavily through her mouth. The woman at the sink dries her hands partially and leaves, the door opening and closing behind the blast of the dryer.

Our girl reaches her hand underneath the wall dividing them. Lena considers the fingers extended toward her, then laces her own between them. They say nothing for a long time, only hold hands under the stall. Lena begins to cry, softly. Aside from the dim noise of the casino making its way back to them, the wet efforts of Lena’s nose and throat are the only sounds heard.

I don’t feel good, says Lena. I miss Kyle.

Are you going to throw up?

No, says Lena. Then, Yes. Our girl releases Lena’s hand and leaves her stall, allowing the door to swing shut behind her. She gets on all fours, the tile cool against her palms, and crawls under the partition into Lena’s big handicapped cube. Lena is on her knees leaning over the bowl, her purse on the floor beside her.

Our girl says, Here, reaching over to lift the toilet seat. As Lena begins to vomit, our girl gathers her friend’s wavy hair in her hand and holds it. Get it out, she says. All out. Between purges Lena emits a mournful language intelligible only to herself, the main theme of which is certainly Kyle.

Our girl fingers the soft baby hairs at Lena’s nape and says, Shh.

Eventually, Lena lifts her head slightly. I think I’m ready to go home, she says.

As though the word has materialized the cloth on her, our girl becomes instantly sensitive to the persisting dampness of her underwear. She sees the Sheetrock bathroom in the back of the pizza parlor. Jeremy the delivery boy. Her stepfather. His long commute to job sites in Vegas. The empty and near-empty potato chip bags swirling around the backseat of his car like deflated Mylar balloons. Then, her memory lurching from shape to shape, there is her mother, hands shaking, unable to sit through a meal without popping up to get him seconds or refill his glass with milk.

Lena heaves again. Our girl tucks Lena’s hair into her shirt collar. She quickly removes her own shoes, her pants, and then her still-damp underpants. She folds the panties in half and half again and tucks them in the paper-lined metal bin meant for soiled feminine hygiene products and their wrappings.

Lena moans into the toilet bowl. I want to go home, she says.

Naked from the waist down, our girl stoops and fishes the car keys from Lena’s purse.

No, you don’t, she says, and begins re-dressing.

As the girls wash and reassemble themselves at the sinks, their eyes meet in the mirror. Our girl nods and says, You’re fine. Let’s have a good time.

Lena smiles weakly. I’m fine, she repeats. They return to the casino.

In her bed, she’ll go on. The room, she’ll begin, remembering two queen-size beds with thin synthetic quilted coverlets in mauve and gold. All the lights turned on. No, the light was from the TV. Beer from cans in a torn box sitting on its side at the bottom of a small black refrigerator. But the sensible man will interrupt her.

Was it all four of them?

No. And she’ll see in his face relief, the excess of which will force her to turn from him, to the window and the pinkening dawn. One of them left to get pancakes, she’ll say. Allen. I gave him directions to IHOP.

Three, then, he’ll say, his voice blank as a dead thing. And you two girls.

We started watching a movie. Something with Halle Berry. Lena said she’d almost done it once with her boyfriend in Minnesota. But.

Had she?

No. I told her she had to get it over with.

Had you?

Yes, she’ll say. But not like that.

What did they do to you?

She will shake her head, a movement nearly imperceptible. It wasn’t like that. Afterward, mine asked for my phone number. Tom, I think. He said, I really like you. Or something.

Did he ever call you?

This question will surprise her, and she will have to pause, trying to remember. No, she’ll say eventually. I gave him the wrong area code. They thought we lived in the city.

And your friend?

Lena. She passed out on the other bed. I thought maybe she was faking. I don’t know why. During the movie the big one got on top of her. Brad. He took off her clothes. Her eyes were shut but she was mumbling something. I don’t know what. The other one spread her out, kind of. The big one spit into his hand. I remember that. I was on the other bed, with mine.

Jesus.

The other one put his dick by her face. He hit her with it, softly. They called her names. Drunk cunt. Fuck rag.

Jesus Christ.

Here, she will stop. Are you sure you want to hear this? she’ll ask. Though she won’t be able to stop even if he asks her to. He’ll nod, slowly.

Lena woke up, she’ll say, during. She got out of the bed and stood by it. They didn’t try to stop her. She was naked, looking at the floor around her. For her clothes, maybe. Or the keys. But then she stopped and just stood there, looking at me. Tom—or whatever—was already inside me. She was just standing there.

Now Lena is limp in the light from the hotel television, as though, underneath her splotchy skin, her bones are no longer adequately bound together. She stares at our girl from between the two beds, her naked body like a question she can’t ask, a prayer she can’t recall. Behind Lena, the two young men look to our girl. The big one is shirtless, with his pants splayed open. The other has removed his pants, though he still wears his collared shirt, buttoned up. His bare ass glows blue in the light from the TV and he holds his dick in his hand. She forces herself to wonder what they want from her, though she knows. Permission.

Once, before Lena got her license, the girls were waiting at the county clinic for Lena’s mother to drive them home, and they found a file folder filled with pictures of diseased genitals mounted on heavy card stock. Lena said her mother used them when she gave sex-ed talks at the high school. Our girl flipped through them. Lena giggled and looked away, saying the pictures were gross. Our girl went on. They were gross, but in a curious, enthralling way, like a topographical map of a place she would never visit. But then there was one photograph in which the photographer, or the doctor—Who takes these pictures? she had wondered suddenly, then thought, A nurse, probably, or an intern—had captured the patient’s thumb and index finger where they held the penis. She could see the man’s grooved thumbnail and a little rind of skin peeling back from the cuticle. It made her wish she weren’t a woman.

In the hotel room, Lena reaches for her friend. She says her name. The boys look to her too, even the one called Tom, above her. Our girl takes Lena’s hand.

It’s okay, she says. We’re having fun.

She urges her friend back to the bed, gently, as though pulling the last bit of something shameful and malignant out through the tips of Lena’s limp fingers.

Afterward, on the way down to the lobby, our girl watches her own face in the polished doors of the elevator, and then Lena’s, puffed around the eyes and mouth, her hair clumped to one side where they’d poured something on her. Through the summer, the tight circles in which the girls circumnavigate the pizza parlor will overlap less and less each day. Sometimes our girl will be at the oven, watching Lena’s back as she works the line, and the heat will well up in her and she’ll want to cry out. But what would she say? Sometimes, as she cuts a pizza, boiling grease cupped in a piece of pepperoni will spatter up and burn the back of her hand, or her bare forearm. This will bring her some relief.

That summer, Lena will shrink and yellow. Her eyes will develop a milky film. Even her big teeth will seem to recede into their gums, as though the whole of her is gradually succumbing to the dimensions of their town, its unpaved streets, its irrigation ditches and fields of stinking alfalfa. The four walls of the pizza parlor, the low popcorned ceiling of her mother’s manufactured home. When Jeremy the delivery boy shuffles back to the walk-in where Lena stocks the commissary and asks her to come over to watch his band practice, she’ll say yes, her voice wet with inevitability and exhaustion. The master bedroom of his trailer will start to feel like her own. Jeremy’s love for her will be an unquestioning and simple thing, with rising swells of covetousness. It will be this particular strain of love—that’s what he’ll call it—that makes him hit her for the first time, on the Fourth of July, on the darkened plot of packed dirt in front of a house party where she’d danced too closely with a friend of his. Our girl will watch this from the porch of the house, where a crowd will have gathered. She will do nothing.

By September, she and Lena will not even nod in the halls. When the announcement comes over the intercom first period, our girl will try to make herself feel the things she is supposed to feel: grief for dead people in buildings she didn’t know existed, sorrow for a place she can’t envision. Deadened, but afraid of the deadening, she will look across the classroom to Lena, hoping to inflict upon herself that sickly shame that the sight of her old friend now evokes, thinking it the least she could do. But Lena—standing humped beside her left-handed desk with her right hand over her heart, crying—will be barely recognizable. This will bring our girl a sturdy rising comfort, a swelling buoyancy: A person can change in an instant. This, almost solely, will take her away from here.

The loudspeaker will emit a disembodied human breath. Things will never be the same, it will say, as if she needs to be told this. As if she doesn’t know the instability of a tall tower, a city’s hunger for ruin. As if this weren’t what she came for.