Veronica

3

Now time for the windows. I only do them once a month because it hurts my arm to reach over my head, which means by the time I do clean, I have to press hard, which also hurts my arm. Every now and then, John gets mad at me for not doing the windows every week and we have a fight. He stands there yelling, “What sense does it make to put it off? You’re telling me it hurts when you press hard? Spray it and wipe it every week and you’re fine!” He’s a short guy with a big head on a long rubbery neck that operates like a rotating turret, and words spray from his mouth like bullets. “Do you even think?” he’ll yell, and I’ll go into my thing of how I have to spare my shoulder, how much it hurts, and he’ll yell about why don’t I go to the doctor, why don’t I get physical therapy, and I’ll remind him of how hard it is with my insurance, how I have to get all these forms, and how it never helps anyway. Crying will come into my voice and he’ll get this wet, harried look in his eyes, and the turret will work uselessly, not knowing what to shoot at.

You. You. When I knew Veronica, I was healthy and beautiful, and I thought I was so great for being friends with somebody who was ugly and sick. I told stories about her to anybody who would listen. I can just hear my high, clear voice describing her antics, her kooky remarks. I can hear the voices of people congratulating me for being good. For being brave.

I drag the bucket across the room. Rain hits the dirty windows in great strokes. The people outside are blurred and runny: a middle-aged woman trying to pull a teenage girl under an umbrella, the girl pulling back and yelling. A car swishes around the corner, filling a fat wet drop with a second of headlight. The girl breaks away and runs into the rain. I think of the Mexican woman with rain running down her face. I spray the window and rub.

Now I’m ugly and sick. I don’t know how long I’ve had hepatitis — probably about fifteen years. It’s only been in the last year that the weakness, the sick stomach, and the fever have kicked up. Sometimes I’m scared, sometimes I feel like I’m being punished for something, sometimes I feel like I’ll be okay. Right now, I’m just glad I don’t have to deal with a beautiful girl telling me I have to learn to love myself.

I stretch up to the top window and breathe into the pain, like it’s a wall I can lean against.

When I say that the songs we listened to at the hostel had a feeling of sickness in them, that doesn’t mean I don’t like them. I did like them, and I still do. The sick feeling wasn’t in all the songs, either. But it was in many songs, and not just the ones for teenagers; you could go to the supermarket and hear it in the Muzak that roamed the aisles, swallowing everything in its soft mouth. It didn’t feel like sickness. It felt like endless opening and expansion, and pleasure that would never end. The songs before that were mostly about pleasure, too — having it, wanting it, or not getting enough of it and being sad. But they were finite little boxes of pleasure, with the simple surfaces of personality and situation.

Then it was like somebody realized you could take the surface of a song, paint a door on it, open it, and walk through. The door didn’t always lead to someplace light and sweet. Sometimes where it led was dark and heavy. That part wasn’t new. A song my father especially loved by Jo Stafford was “I’ll Be Seeing You.” During World War II, it became a lullaby about absence and death for boys who were about to die and kill. I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you. In the moonlight of this song, the known things, the tender things, “the carousel, the wishing well,” appear outlined against the gentle twilight of familiarity and comfort. In the song, that twilight is a gauze veil of music, and Stafford’s voice subtly deepens, and gives off a slight shudder as she touches against it. The song does not go any further than this touch because beyond the veil is killing and dying, and the song honors killing and dying. It also honors the little carousel. It knows the wishing well is a passageway to memory and feeling — maybe too much memory and feeling, ghosts and delusion. Jo Stafford’s eyes on the album cover say that she knew that. She knew the dark was huge and she had humility before it.

The new songs had no humility. They pushed past the veil and opened a window into the darkness and climbed through it with a knife in their teeth. The songs could be about rape and murder, killing your dad and fucking your mom, and then sailing off on a crystal ship to a thousand girls and thrills, or going for a moonlight drive. They were beautiful songs, full of places and textures — flesh, velvet, concrete, city towers, desert sand, snakes, violence, wet glands, childhood, the pure wings of night insects. Anything you could think of was there, and you could move through it as if it were an endless series of rooms and passages full of visions and adventures. And even if it was about killing and dying — that was just another place to go.

When I still lived at home, I had to share a room with my sisters, Daphne and Sara. Two of us would share a huge bed with a giant headboard, and the third had half a bunk bed to herself on the other side of the room. We rotated to be fair. The good thing about the single bed was that it felt more mature, and that the wall above it had special cardboard cutouts our mom had made of huge-eyed dancing teens in short skirts and boots. Plus, you could masturbate privately, without having to carefully lift the blankets off your working arm and stiffen up to keep the mattress from shaking — and still wonder if your sister knew what you were doing. But if you shared the big bed, there was the fun of shutting out the third, giggling and whispering secrets under the blankets while the loner hissed, “Shut up!” Sometimes it felt better not to have to touch legs and butts together. Other times it was good to have your back right against your sister’s back, especially if she was asleep and you could feel her presence without her feeling yours.

We also had to take turns sharing the record player. Daphne and Sara didn’t like the music I liked — they still liked the old kind recorded on 45s. They’d pretend to be go-go dancers, dancing on the tiny green chairs we’d sat in as little kids to eat peanut butter from teacups. Sometimes when they danced, I’d roll my eyes and hunch up over a book or storm out. But sometimes I’d jump up on a green chair and yell, “I’m Roxanne!” after the most beautiful dancer on Hullabaloo. Daphne would yell, “I’m Linda!” and Sara would yell, “I’m Sherry!” even though whenever Sherry came on the TV, my father said, “There’s that big fat girl again.” Then we’d go wild dancing for as long as the record lasted.

My music was more private, and I didn’t play it loudly. I crouched down by it, sucking it into my ears, tunneling into it at the same time. Daphne sprawled on her bed, reading, and Sara maybe played one of her strange games with miniature animals, talking to herself softly in different animal voices. Downstairs, my father watched TV or listened to his music while my mother did housework or drew paper clothes for the cardboard paper dolls she still made for us, even though we no longer played with them. I loved them like you love your hand or your liver, without thinking about it or even being able to see it. But my music made that fleshly love feel dull and dumb, deep, slow, and heavy as stone. Come, said the music, to joy and speed and secret endlessness, where everything tumbles together and attachments are not made of sad flesh.

I didn’t know it, but my father was doing the same thing, sitting in his padded rocking chair, listening to opera or to music from World War II. Except he did not want tumbling or endlessness. He wanted more of the attachment I despised — he just didn’t want it with us. My father had been too young to enlist when World War II started; his brother joined the army right away. When my dad was finally old enough to enlist in the navy, he sent his brother a picture of himself in his uniform with a Hawaiian girl on his lap; he wrote, “Interrogating the natives!” on the back. A week before the war ended, it was returned to my father with a letter saying his brother was dead. Thirty years later, he was a husband, father, and administrator in a national tax-office chain. But sometimes when I walked past him sitting in his chair, he would look at me as if I were the cat or a piece of furniture, while inside he searched for his brother. And through his brother, his mother and father. And through them, a world of people and feelings that had ended too abruptly and that had nothing to do with where he was now. He wasn’t searching for memories; he already had them. He wanted the physical feel of sitting next to his brother or looking into his eyes, and he was searching for it in the voices of strangers that had sung to them both a long time ago. I was so attached to my father that I felt this. But I felt it without knowing what it was, and I didn’t care enough to think about it. Who wants to think about their liver or their hand? Who wants to know about a world of people who are dead? I was busy following the music, tumbling through my head and out the door.

My parents were right: When summer ended, I did not go back home. At seventeen, I lived with twelve other kids (sometimes more slept on the floor) in a three-story purple house that listed to one side. I worked for a florist, selling flowers in the bars and outside go-go clubs in North Beach. The bars were little humpbacked caves with bright liquor bottles and sometimes a glowing red jukebox inside. I went in with my basket, and drunk people would dig around for money. Spirits swam in the cloudy mirror behind the bar, rising up and sinking away. The go-go clubs didn’t let me in, but I could hang out in front, talking with the bouncer and warming myself in the heat from the door. Men would say, “Here’s the Little Match Girl!” and drop bills in my basket without taking anything. There were huge neon signs above us, a big red one of an apple and a snake and a naked woman with big tits.

When we were done, my friend Lilet and I would meet in a coffee shop to count our money and have pie or fries. Then we’d take a late bus to Golden Gate Park and get high. At night, the park was thick with the smell of flowers and pot, wrapped in darkness and smells, hidden, so you could find it only if you knew the right way in. People sat in clumps or flitted in and out of the trees with night joy in their faces, sporting hot-colored hair dye and wearing zebra prints and pointy-toed boots. Sometimes I’d meet a boy and we’d walk so far up in the hills, we could see the ocean. We’d look up and see the fog race in the sky, then look down and see trees, houses, knots of electric lights. I’d feel like an animal on a pinnacle, ready to leap. We’d kiss and put our hands down each other’s pants.

Or Lilet and I would join a group and go to a crash pad, usually a cheap apartment, but sometimes a house with a lot of people in it. Everybody would be high and there’d be music filling the rooms with heavy, rolling dreams. Some people found a private spot in a dream, curled into it, and slept on the floor. Some people made it a dream of kissing and touching; peering into a dark corner, you could see a white butt humping up and down between open knees. Guys would talk loudly to one another about whatever they were thinking about or things that they did. I remember a guy talking about a girl he’d gotten pregnant. He’d told her to get on the ground and eat dirt first, and she did. “And then I fertilized it!” he said. The guys laughed, and the girls watched with intent, quiet eyes. I went out on the fire escape with Lilet and we sat with our legs dangling down, somebody’s lilac bushes between our feet.

I wanted something to happen, but I didn’t know what. I didn’t have the ambition to be an important person or a star. My ambition was to live like music. I didn’t think of it that way, but that’s what I wanted; it seemed like that’s what everybody wanted. I remember people walking around like they were wrapped in an invisible gauze of songs, one running into the next — songs about sex, pain, injustice, love, triumph, each song bursting with ideal characters that popped out and fell back as the person walked down the street or rode the bus.

I saw Lilet surrounded by music. She was seventeen and, like me, she’d left her family. She was blond, with wide cheekbones and pink skin that shone with the radiant grease of hormonal abundance. She fed the engine inside her with zest, gobbling stuff — big sandwiches and ice cream in paper dishes and French fries and bags of hot cashews from vendors — with both hands while we stood on the corner chatting, our baskets on our hips. She wore tight clothes that showed her stomach sticking out under the cheap cloth. She wore thick high heels and she walked proudly, thrusting out not only her breasts, which most girls did, but her stomach and her jaw, too, like they were also good. She walked like a dog — aggressive, interested, and curious, strutting alongside people with her basket, saying, “Buy a flower for the lady?” We’d meet for breaks in front of a club called the Brown Derby, which had a big derby sign outlined in sputtering gold bulbs, and she’d eat with both hands and talk about men. She was always with older men, not rich guys, but truck drivers and bartenders, drifters. They were almost never handsome, but she seemed to think they were. She was always excited about stuff they gave her, or did with her sexually. I remember a guy who came by for her one night; he was walking a Doberman on a long leash. His face was heavy and caved in, like somebody’d crushed it, but his eyes were shiny and fierce as his dog’s. They stood together and laughed, Lilet petting the dog’s glossy black head and letting it lick her hand with its dripping pink tongue. When he left, she told me she’d let him butt-fuck her. “Did you get on your elbows and knees?” I asked. “No!” she said. “That’s not the only way to do it — you lie on your back and he pushes your legs up.” Right away, I pictured it — her head raised a little so she could watch him, and her stomach sticking up in a mound. In my picture, her stomach was radiant in the same way as her greasy pink skin, with gold rays coming off it. I understood pornography then, how men could look at actual pictures like this and feel things. Sexual, but also the way you feel when you hear songs on the radio — the joy in knowing everybody’s listening to them and understanding them.

I saw music, too, in the people I got stoned with in the park or saw dancing at parties or bars. I remember this boy and girl I saw dancing at a crash pad once. They didn’t touch or act sexy, but they looked at each other the whole time, like they were connected through their eyes. They didn’t pay any attention to the rhythm of the music. They danced to its secret personality — clownish and gross, like something big and dumb stuck in a tar pit and trying to walk its way out with brute force. Like being stuck and gross was something great.

In my mind, models and stars didn’t have any of this. Though I remember once seeing a picture of one who almost did. She was shot so close-up, you could barely see what she was wearing (crumpled lace); her lipstick was smeared and a boy mussed her hair as he pressed a joint to her open dry lips. Her eyes rolled unevenly in her head, so that one stared blankly at the camera and the other shimmered near the top of her eyelid. I looked at her for a long moment; then I tore her picture out of the magazine and tacked it up on the wall of my room. I didn’t understand why I liked it. Even if the girl really was stoned, it was just a pose. Mostly, these poses were like closed doors I couldn’t open, and this one was, too. Except that you could hear muffled sounds coming from behind it, voices, footsteps — music.

You see a lot more pictures like this in magazines now. Fashion has linked itself to music and so it, too, seems to expand forever into room after room. Maybe it does. But it’s nothing compared to those people dancing, or even to Lilet wolfing her food on the street corner.

Because we sold flowers outside bars and go-go clubs, prostitutes were some of our best customers; the nice ones bossed their johns into buying from us. Most of them weren’t beautiful girls, but they had a special luster, like something you could barely see shining at the bottom of a deep well. They treated us like little sisters, and we were tempted to join them when men came around looking for “models”—which everybody knew meant stripper or whore. Mostly, we would indignantly say no, but sometimes somebody would say yes. I said yes a couple of times. Why I picked those times to say yes, I don’t know. One was an old fat man with a spotted face and pale, aggrieved eyes. He ran some kind of business, maybe postcards or comic books. He leaned on a counter in the back room of his store and blinked his pale eyes while I took off my clothes. When I was naked, he looked awhile and then asked if he could look at me from behind. I said okay; he walked around me in a circle and then went back behind the counter again. “You have beautiful hips and legs,” he said. “Beautiful shoulders, too. But your breasts are small and they’re not that good.” He talked to me about the kind of work I might do while I put my clothes back on.

“You mean porn?”

“Sure, we do some porn. There’s more money for the girls that way. But we do seminude art, as well.” His eyes became more aggrieved. “Do you care what the other girls do?”

I shrugged. Outside the window, electric music corkscrewed through the air. If he hadn’t insulted my boobs, I might’ve tried it out. But I just said bye and left.

Like a cat in the dark, your whisker touched something the wrong way and you backed out. Except sometimes it was a trap baited with something so enticing, you pushed your face in anyway. Once when I was out with my basket, a short man with a square torso said, “Hey, hot shit — you should come work for me.” He bounced a rubber ball on the pavement, caught it, and bounced it again. “I’m a pimp.” His face was like lava turned into cold rock. But inside him, it was still running hot; you could smell it: pride, rage, and shame boiling and ready to spill out his cock and scald you. I stared in fear. He just laughed and bounced his ball; he knew that for somebody what he had was the perfect enticement. The street was full of these enticements, always somebody grabbing you or trying to get something, and us, the girls, proud of our refusals, and sometimes proud that we went ahead with it.

Some of the kids I knew didn’t have parents, or didn’t know them, but most of us did, so barely in the past that it was like they were in the next room. I still felt their breath and the warmth of their bodies, but I so took it for granted, I didn’t know what I was feeling. I had walked out through the gauze veil of the song, not into killing and dying, but into colored lights, hunt and escape. But my parents were still there, like the wishing well and carousel, hidden in shimmering spots. “She’s going to make her way in the world,” said my mother. She stood at the counter, stirring a bright bowl with her brisk arm. She opened a book on her lap, and read a story about a wicked girl who fell down among evil creatures. My father wandered off into his music, but he came back in the cloudy barroom mirror to watch over me. I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing—

I’m finishing up the windows when John comes in, dripping wet and obviously thinking about everything that’s already gone wrong so far today.

“Hey, Allie,” he says, and holds up the box of doughnuts he’s gotten from the grimy take-out store. I climb down from the ladder, making pain noises and exaggerating how hard it is.

“Hey, John. How’s Lonnie?”

“She’s okay.”

“How’s the baby?”

“Cried all night. Lonnie was up and down all night.”

His wife, Lonnie, is a sweet, chunky woman with flabby arms. When she holds their baby, he plays with her flab and he loves it.

John takes off his coat with angry jerks and sets down the doughnuts the same way. He moves like he’s being yelled at by invisible people whom he hates but whom he basically agrees with. He smooths his hair like somebody just yelled, “And look at that hair!” Still smoothing, he turns around in a tight circle, sniffing the air, the contents of his whole head suddenly quivering on the end of his nose. Somebody must’ve just yelled something else. “Alison? Alison, have you been smoking in here?”

“John—”

“You have! Don’t bother to lie! Jesus! How many times do I have to tell you? If you want to kill yourself, do it at home! I know there’s no audience there, but it smells like a cheap motel in here, and the people who come here don’t want to smell that!”

“It smells because I did the windows and tore up my arm.”

“I’m not talking about your damn arm, which wouldn’t hurt if you’d even try to take care of it. I’m talking about smoking in my office, which I’ve—”

“John. John?” A whine comes into my voice, like an animal showing its ass. “I always smoke one cigarette, one, because that’s what it takes to clean the windows. I’d smoke more, but I don’t because—”

“Don’t run that number on me!” He is yelling now, but his eyes are sad and hard. “All I’m asking for is basic respect of my place! Respect and honesty and no bullshit manipulation!” Why is it like this? asks his voice. Why is it like this?

“You don’t know.” I speak quietly, looking down. “You don’t know.” I’m humiliated. He’s angry. That way, we touch together. Tears come into my eyes. I look up; John looks away.

“Just open the window,” he says. “I’ll make us some coffee.”

It really does hurt to open the window, but I don’t say anything. The bush outside is live and wet, a green lung for the sluicing wind and rain. John’s putting out doughnuts and coffee for us. The invisible people are looking away.

A long time ago, John loved me. I never loved him, but I used his friendship, and the using became so comfortable for both of us that we started really being friends. When I lost my looks and had to go on disability, John pitied me and then looked down on me, but that just got fit into the friendship, too. What can’t get fit in is that sometimes even now John looks at me and sees a beautiful girl in a ruined face. It’s broken, with age and pain coming through the cracks, but it’s there, and it pisses him off. It pisses me off, too. When we have these fights and he hears crying and hurt in my voice, it’s a different version of that ruined beauty, except it’s not something he can see, so he can’t think ruined or beauty. He just feels it, like sex when it’s disgusting but you want it anyway. Like his baby plays with the flabby arms, not knowing they’re ugly. I can’t have a baby and we’re not going to fuck, but it’s still in my voice — sex and warm arms mixed with hurt and ugliness, so he can’t separate them. When that happens, it doesn’t matter that I’m not beautiful or even pretty, and he is confused and unhappy.

I always had that, but I didn’t know it until now. It’s the reason somebody once thought I could be a model, the thing they kept trying to photograph and never did. When I was young, my beauty held it in a case that wouldn’t open. Then it broke open. Now that I’m almost fifty, it’s there, so much so that even John feels it without knowing what it is. It’s disgusting to whore it out in a fight over cigarettes, but that’s life.

One night on the street, a small man wearing a red suit bought a yellow rose from me. I remember the color of the rose because I looked down at his feet and saw he had yellow socks on. The rose matched his socks! He said he ran a modeling agency and that I could be a model. He handed me a card with gold lettering on it. I took it, but I kept staring at his eyes; his expression was like somebody giving his hand to an animal so it could sniff, and holding back the other. He said, “Very nice.” He put the flower back in my basket and walked away like he was tossing and catching a coin, like the pimp bouncing his ball, except he didn’t have anything to bounce. The card said “Carson Models, Gregory Carson.”

Carson Models was up a staircase between store windows full of cheap sassy clothes and glaring sun. I noticed a bag of shocking pink fur with a smooth gold clasp, and then ran up the cool stairway. Gregory Carson was waiting for me with a photographer who had a large head and the eyes of a person looking from far away at terrible, beautiful things. He took my hand and looked at me. His name was John. He was the only other person there because it was Saturday; Gregory Carson had wanted me to come on a weekend so that he could give me his full attention.

Gregory Carson said the same thing about my boobs as the fat man, but not right away. First, we drank wine while John set up his camera. Gregory paced, as if he could barely contain his excitement. He talked about how important a model’s personality was. He talked about sending me to Paris. When I asked what Paris was like, he cried, “You’re going to find out!” and leapt straight up and did a jig, like a chipmunk scrambling in the air. I glanced at John. He looked like a cardboard display of a friendly person. Gregory went into a corner and flicked a switch; music came on. It was a popular song with a hot liquid voice. “Ossifier,” it sang. “Love’s desire. High and higher.”

I didn’t know how to pose, but it didn’t matter; the music was like a big red flower you could disappear into. The sweetness of it was a complicated burst of little tastes, but under that was a big broad muscle of sound. It was like the deep feeling of dick inside and the tiny sparkling feelings outside on the clit. Except it was also like when you’re in love and not thinking the words dick or clit. Gregory Carson watched ecstatically, a tiny complicated thing looking for a big broad thing to hold him. “Doesn’t she remind you of Brandy G.?” he cried. “Do you remember her, John?” John said yes, he did, and Gregory leapt up and scrambled again. I pictured him tiny, scrambling on a giant clit. I giggled, and Gregory said, “That’s right! Have fun!”

So I did. It was like the first time I made a sex noise, and instead of being embarrassing, it was great. It was like being with people I didn’t know and making them stop so I could go in a store and buy chocolate milk, instead of worrying they would think I was a baby or a pig — and it tasted great. It was like eating pudding forever, or driving in your car forever, or feeling the dick you love forever, right before he sticks it in. Far away, my dad was playing songs for men who thought he was crazy. I was going to be a model and make money walking around inside songs everybody knew.

Then Gregory said he had to see me naked. “We aren’t taking any more pictures,” he said. “No one ever shoots you nude. I have to look at you because I’m the agent.” He went to turn the music off, and suddenly John was in the room. He looked at me so hard, it was like a meaty head zoomed out of his cardboard body. His eyes were different: There was no BS about beautiful and terrible things. He was saying something — what was it? The music shut off. “All righty!” said Gregory. John’s head got pulled back into the cardboard. He smiled and said he hoped he’d see me again. Gregory walked him to the door. When he came back, I was naked. The stereo was still making an electrical buzz. The big broad thing had sucked the music back inside it.

Gregory looked at me. “You’re five pounds overweight,” he said gently. “And your breasts aren’t that good.” He touched my cheek with the back of his hand. “But right now, that doesn’t matter.” Ossifier’s bright red voice sang in my head: Don’t hesitate ’cause the world seems cold. “Alison,” said Gregory Carson, “I’d like you to tell me about the first grade.” He said “first grade” like it was something wonderful to eat, something he hadn’t had for a long time. He looked like he might jump up and dance on the clit again. I looked down and felt my face frown. In the first grade, Miss Field was my teacher. She taught me how to write in big black letters. Ossifier stopped singing. Miss Field sat at her desk and folded her hands. A terrible feeling came over me. I felt like she was there, getting sucked into the electrical buzz. I didn’t want her to be there. I didn’t want her to be eaten.

Gregory reached out and took a tear out of my eye right as it fell. He put it in his mouth. He was tasting the terrible feeling and his eyes were full of pity. He had come to the deep liver place, where I was still a child attached to my family. He recognized it and he respected it, a little. “It’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to say.” He reached down and held me between the legs. Here it was. Ossifier. Miss Field floated in a bright, distant oval. He watched my face as he rubbed me with his hand. He didn’t care if he was a pig or a baby. The chocolate milk was delicious. His face came close and his one eye grew giant. Miss Field’s bright oval winked shut and she was gone. Gregory Carson’s eye said, After you, baby! and then we got sucked into the electrical buzz together.

One night at work, Veronica asked me how I got into modeling, and I said, “By fucking a nobody catalog agent who grabbed my crotch.” I said it with disdain — like I didn’t have to be embarrassed or make up something nice, because Veronica was nobody — like why should I care if an ant could see up my dress? Except I didn’t notice my disdain; it was habitual by then. She noticed it, though. The arched eyebrows shot up and the lined, prissy face zinged out an expression sharp and hard as a bee sting. This ugly little woman had a sting! I would’ve stung back, but I was suddenly abashed by her buzzing ugliness. But then her expression became many expressions, and when she talked, her voice was kind.

“Every pretty girl has a story like that, hon,” she said. “I had that prettiness, too. I have those stories.”

I looked at her and my face must’ve said, Like what?

“I once had an affair with a man I worked with. It was a dull job doing market research — I had to do something. Anyway, it was toward the end of the relationship, not much excitement left, when he remarked that he’d never had anal sex. I said, ‘Really? I’ll do it with you.’ He said, ‘Are you sure?’ And I said, ‘Certainly!’ Like I was performing a public service.

“Well, he was ecstatic. He told me later that during an office party he related this event to one of his friends from a visiting organization and that the guy insisted on knowing who I was. He pointed me out — discreetly, he assured me — and, according to him, the guy said, ‘Why, she’s cute!’ Amazed apparently that I didn’t look like some desperate slut, but I was quite flattered.”

“You were?”

“Yes! The only time I was not flattered was a year or so later. It was during the Christmas party, after we had broken up; each department was nominating people for best smile, best legs, best ass, and so forth. I asked him if he’d nominated my ass and he said no. I sulked for the rest of the night.”

She drew on her cigarette, blew out. “Of course, you’re a lot prettier than I was — you’d have won the contest hands down!” She laughed. “But prettiness is always about pleasing people. When you stop being pretty, you don’t have to do that anymore. I don’t have to do that anymore. It’s my show now.” She said these words as if she were a movie star walking past me while I gaped.

“I wasn’t trying to please anyone,” I said uncertainly.

“No?” She stubbed out her cigarette in a bright yellow ashtray. “What were you trying to do?”

Imagine ten pictures of this conversation. In nine of them, she’s the fool and I’m the person who has something. But in the tenth, I’m the fool and it’s her show now. For just a second, that’s the picture I saw.

Fucking Gregory Carson was like falling down the rabbit hole and seeing things flying by without knowing what they meant. Except I was the rabbit hole at the same time, and he was stuffing things down it like crazy, just throwing everything in, like he couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. And I could take it all. I was on my back and he on his knees; he grabbed my ankles and spread my legs up over my head until my pelvis split all the way open. I pushed myself off the floor with both hands and rose up to face him. His small chest swelled as he reared above me; his stomach stuck out like a proud drum and I could feel his asshole alight and tingling on the end of his spine. His face looked like he was saying, Remember this when they’re taking your picture. Remember this. Like he was stuffing me full of him so that any picture of me would be a picture of him, too, because people who looked would see him staring out of my eyes.

When it was over, I went down the stairs like I was sliding down a chute and came out the other end of the rabbit hole. On the street, it was business as usual. There was no secret language of little complicated things. The fog had come in and the store windows had gone dull. It was cold and I was hungry. I found a diner, where I had a piece of blueberry pie with two creamers poured over it, then tea with sugar. Across from me, a meager girl with raw bare legs was crying against a big older woman in a rough coat. Flares kept going off in my body, rushes of strange, blank sensation, like bursts of electricity. Gregory Carson had given me cab fare, but I kept it and took the bus. It soothed me to sit with so many people and to rock with the movement of the bus creaking up hill after hill. The flaring subsided and my body quieted; with listless wonder, I realized that the song had not really said “ossifier.” It had said “hearts of fire,” which I thought was not as good.

I called Carson Models twice after that, but nobody called me back. Then a woman with an accusing voice called and told me I had a go-see South of Market. I asked if I could talk to Mr. Carson and she said he was busy. Would I go or not? she asked. I went and sat on a long stairway with a line of other girls. We rolled up the stairs on our bottoms like a caterpillar moving along in sections, each section a girl stuck to another girl. The one in front of me rocked back and forth, whispering, “Shit! Fuck! Shit! Fuck!” The one behind me held her pretty chin in her hand and read a paperback that had a screaming woman raised off the cover in bright colors. At the top of the stairs was a large room with two men in it. They wore beautiful clothes and they whirred like little machines that somebody wound up every day.

“Where’s your book?” asked one.

“Book?” Confusedly, I glanced at the girl with the paperback.

The whirring stopped. A human head popped out a little shuttered hole in his mechanical head and glared at me in disgust.

“She’s one of Gregory’s,” whispered the other.

“Oh.” He mildly rolled his eyes and withdrew back into the mechanical head. The whirring continued. “Walk a little; then turn to face me,” he said.

I walked a foot and he said, “Thank you. Next!”

The next week when a roommate yelled up the stairs that “somebody model agency” was on the phone, I said, “Tell them to fuck off!” and he did, loudly.

Weeks passed; it got cold and the park emptied. The smell of flowers was gone and by itself the pot was a thin and ragged wrap. Even in the dark, you noticed garbage. You saw shadows running out of the corner of your eye. Gangs of bikers came, huge men with a feeling of piled-up corpses inside them. One of them had a puppy with a dirty rope around its neck. Its eyes were full of misery, and when I petted it, it felt dead inside. It was like it had been killed while it was still alive. The guy holding the rope smiled maliciously. Very slowly, I turned and walked out of the park.

It got too cold to sell flowers outside. Lilet went to Las Vegas with a guy who had bought her an orange fake-fur coat. I got a dress at the Salvation Army and interviewed to be a file clerk. I still sold flowers, but instead of going to the park after, I went to my room and wrote poems. I was going to go home, go to community college and learn to be a poet. I fantasized about becoming famous, but I couldn’t picture what famous poets did. I could only imagine walking around while people photographed me. I could imagine Gregory Carson’s tiny hands clutching the glowing rim of my world, and his tiny, longing head peering over it. I imagined that over and over when I lay in bed at night.

I was going to call my family and tell them I was coming home, but before I could, Daphne called and said our mother had just moved out and gone to live with a guy from the car repair place. “Daddy feels like everyone’s leaving him,” she said. “He cries at night, Alison. It’s horrible.” I asked her to put him on. I felt like a hero, telling him I was coming home to go to school. He asked when. I said in a few weeks — when I had the airfare. He said he’d send me the money, and I felt proud refusing it. I didn’t wonder how he felt offering it. He was quiet and then he said, “Just get here as quick as you can. I love you a whole lot.” When Daphne came back on the phone, I asked her if he’d really cried.

“Just once that I heard,” she said. “But I think it’s been more.”

She waited for me to say something, but I didn’t know what to say.

“I think maybe if you come back, Mother will, too,” said Daphne.

I still didn’t say anything. I was remembering something that happened when I was ten. I was walking with my parents in an underground parking lot and my mother tripped and fell on her face. She went straight down on the concrete, then lay there with her mouth wide open, arms bent and palms flat, like she wanted to push herself up but couldn’t. She lifted her head and made a long, low moan, like a cow. Her body had protected her face, but her breath had been knocked from her. I didn’t know what to do. I turned to my dad, who was just behind us. He was smiling, like it was really funny to see my mom fall on her face and make a stupid noise. When he came close, he hid the smile; it amazed me how fast he hid it. “Lord,” he said. “Are you all right?” He helped her up, and it turned out she was okay. But I still hated him for smiling. I remembered it now, and I tried to work up anger at him again. But all I could think about was him alone, crying.

I didn’t get the file clerk job, so I sold flowers outside the stripper bars until late, when men would come out drunk and give me bills. At the end of the night, I’d go home to count it out on my bed and then I’d store it in a pair of folded socks in the back of the drawer. I’d sit on my bed in a T-shirt and underwear, writing poems while voices went past my window on clomping feet. I’d sleep at dawn to the sound of garbage trucks and wake to music from the weird-ass guy in the basement, the sound coming up through the heat vent like a haint.

I had enough to buy my ticket when I saw John in the park. I didn’t recognize him until he walked up to me and started telling me he was sorry. He said, “We were in the same position that day, you and I.” That’s when I first noticed his neck, tense and rubbery, already angry and ready to torque around. “Gregory plays that game with girls all the time, and I go along because he gives me work. But I hate it, and after that day with you, I walked out and said, ‘Fuck it. I’m not doing this again.’ ” I tried to act like I’d known what was going on, that nobody had fooled me. And he let me act that way — his eyes did not say, Come on, girl, you know you got took! — maybe because he was kind, maybe because he didn’t notice I was acting. “But with you, he was also stupid,” he continued. “Because you really could do it. I saw it right away.” He wanted to send my pictures to a magazine modeling contest, and he needed me to fill out a contest form. He needed my address so he could let me know what happened.

Imagine ten pictures of me at Carson Models. In nine of them, I’m a real stupid girl, but in the tenth, I’m somebody who could be a model. John was looking at the tenth one, and because he was, I did, too. I said okay and gave him my parents’ address in New Jersey. The next day, I got on the plane and flew home.

It’s weird for me, too, looking at John and seeing a young guy turned into a twitchy middle-aged man being chased around his own office by invisible people; it’s like an emotional funny bone. The terrible, beautiful things zoomed up close, flattened us, and sped off. Well, they flattened me. Him they just sped past. Which was lucky for him. Now he actually has something good, when he can stop twitching long enough to enjoy it. He has a house with a family and he has an office, a nest of past and present, where a remnant of everything he thought he wanted comes and cleans his toilet for him. He can yell at it and be yelled at by it and the invisible people go quiet and fade away. Then there’s doughnuts with colored icing — pink, lavender, white with little hairs of coconut — and talk about the new baby he’s had at fifty-two with a woman fifteen years younger.

“He just grooves on everything, Alison, and when he looks at me I do, too. To bring home food to them, to be the provider — I can’t tell you how it makes me feel.”

He doesn’t have to tell me. I can see it in his face: Happiness shines on his dullard sadness and makes it scratch its head and blink with wonder.

“But sometimes I feel shut out, you know? Lonnie and Eddie are so bonded, so physical, it’s like I’m a total third wheel, like this … utility unit. And I wonder, What about my dreams? You know?”

“John, when I was eight, I dreamed about being a ballerina. It was a good dream for an eight-year-old.”

“What about now? What are your dreams?” A sly, sad look comes out of his eye like a tiny eye on a stalk, and he’s behind the camera again.

“My dream is being able to sleep and to stop my arm from hurting.” To stop traveling through the endless rooms that don’t have music or people in them anymore. “But John, you’ve got your dream; you’re living it. I can see it in your face!”

And he can see it, too, now that I say it. It’s something I can give him, something I hold out in warm arms. He talks about Lonnie and the baby again, how sometimes he’s scared he won’t make enough money for them, how he doesn’t want them to see he’s scared. Except he doesn’t come right out with that last part. I have to say it; he denies it, then says, “Maybe,” and looks off to the side, chewing.

“I just want our house to be a house of love,” he says.

“It will be,” I say. As long as you quit going mental about shit like one cigarette! I don’t say. We sit there together like satisfied animals, full of doughnuts. Maybe he hears what I don’t say and maybe he even listens; he pays me my hundred bucks for the month without checking to see what kind of job I did on the toilet. I say bye and walk out into the rain.

The air smells of gasoline, dirt, and trees; cars farting out of hot iron stomachs; and the fresh BO of nature. Down the street, there’s still a picket line out in front of the Nissan dealership, people standing in mud-colored rain slickers, their faces looking like crude sketches under their dripping hoods: brows, nose, lips, jowls. Clear plastic bags are tied over their signs, which read DON’T BUY FROM NISSAN. DON’T BUY FROM SCABS. Most of them trudge in a circle, like they are trudging through a ritual they no longer remember the meaning of but which they dimly believe is their only hope. Two others stand outside the circle, their plastic hoods thrown back, talking and laughing furious, face-crushing laughter as the rain pours down on their heads. They’ve been there a month. I try to catch somebody’s eye to wish them luck, like I usually do. But nobody looks up in the rain.

The endless beautiful rooms inside the songs — wander through them long enough and their beauty and endlessness become horrible. There is so much, you always want more, so you keep moving, traveling ever more quickly, until you can’t stop. Ten years ago, I used to see these kids running around in white makeup, sleeping in phony coffins, and paying dentists to give them vampire fangs. It was stupid, but it made sense, too. You want the endlessness to end; you want to go home, but there is no home. You despise the tender attachments of the liver and the body, but you also crave them; you bite other people in an attempt to find them, and when that doesn’t work, you bite yourself.

Veronica and I went once to see an exhibit of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. She wore a bright red leather jacket with buckled pockets, and she promenaded through the gallery in it, making loud approving comments on the work. She was talking so loudly, she didn’t notice the two giggling boys who followed us for a good half minute, mocking her officious gestures. We lost them in front of the famous self-portrait, in which Mapplethorpe crouches naked, his back to the camera, a bullwhip coming out of his ass like a tail, his face turned round with a triumphant leer. A woman standing behind us said in a voice of thrilled dismay, “I didn’t need to see that!” and Veronica turned on her like the Red Queen. “Then why did you come?” she snapped. “I certainly didn’t need to see or to hear you.” The woman nearly stumbled trying to hide behind her husband, who was trying to hide behind her.

But when we walked out of the museum, Veronica began to cry incoherently. “Everything we did is being erased,” she said. “They’re denying it all. They’re taking it all away.” I was embarrassed; I didn’t understand. Now I understand.

So one minute I’m standing outside a strip bar with my basket, flickering in the marquee light, on and off, like a ghost trying to be real. Women’s naked asses, men’s naked faces. The bouncer hugs himself against the cold and says he’ll buy me some hot cashews. Then I’m in an airplane hurtling through gray clouds. The plane rattles like it will break, and the woman in the next seat moans with fear. Then I’m in the living room with my father. It’s like I crashed out of the clouds. Sara is upstairs, yelling at someone on the phone, and Daphne is in the kitchen, making dinner. We crash into one another; everything rattles and shakes like the airplane, only more, and we can’t hear one another even though we’re shouting.

When they picked me up in Newark, my father’s eyes were inward and methodical. He did not show the love he’d talked about on the phone. I didn’t, either. All the emotion was in Daphne’s eyes, big and shimmering, with so much hope in them, I wanted to punch her. Sara looked at me and then looked away quickly. She was getting fat. She was disappearing in plain sight. Her look made sure I was okay, then went back to concentrating on whatever she was hiding. When she turned in profile, I saw her nose had been broken. “How’d that happen?” I whispered to Daphne. “I don’t know. I don’t know when it happened. I just noticed it one day, and she yelled, ‘I don’t wanna talk about it!’ ” Daphne made Sara’s voice like a monster’s, like a stupid, crazy monster.

We drove home through a whooshing tunnel of traffic. It was dark, with bright signs and lights flying by. Daphne sat up front and talked light and fast, turning her head to scatter her words in the backseat and out the window, into the whooshing tunnel. Quarters, halves, whole squares of light flew through the back window and ran over her soft hair. Even when she talked to me and Sara, I felt a strand of her attention stay on our dad, like she was holding his hand. Sara sat deep inside herself, her hands together in her lap, holding the secret of her broken nose. Her calm animal warmth filled the backseat.

When we got home, my mother called. She said she was so happy to know I was there. Her voice ran and jumped, as if it were being chased by a devil with a pitchfork. “When are you going to enroll?” she cried. “I have to take the GED first,” I said. “I have to study.” “Well, I just think you’re great,” she said. She sounded like she was about to cry. My father stood in the next room, ramrod-straight and straining to hear.

Daphne made a special dinner of kielbasa sausage and baked beans, which I used to love but which now seemed so sad, I didn’t want it. But I ate it, and when my father asked, “Do you like it?” I said, “It’s good.” Sara picked out the sausage, glaring at it like she was really pissed. She ate the beans and went upstairs. “She’s a vegetarian now,” said Daphne. “Probably stuffing herself with candy,” said my dad. Van Cliburn played Tchaikovsky in the next room; in the dining room, the TV was on mute. The months in San Francisco were folded up into a bright tiny box and put down somewhere amid the notices and piles of coupons. I was blended into the electrical comfort of home, where our emotions ran together and were carried by music and TV images. Except for Sara’s — she couldn’t join the current. I don’t know why, but she couldn’t.

The next day, Daphne and I drove to meet our mom at a coffee shop in White Plains. We got there first and waited for her. It was a family place with tiny jukeboxes on the tables. Daphne turned the knob on our box, dully flipping through the selections—“You Are Everything,” “I Had Too Much to Dream,” “Incense and Peppermint,” “Close to You”—each a bit of black print inside a red rectangle. The people behind us picked one: “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You.” The singer’s voice was light and gloppy at the same time, like a commercial for pudding. It had been popular when we were in elementary school, and the old recording gave off a dark, enchanted crackle. It made me think of teenage girls in bathing suits, lying in lawn chairs beside the public pool, eyes closed, breasts perfectly and synthetically cupped. Each blue wave sparkled with light. Boys shook water from their hair and looked at them. Daphne ran past, joyfully waving an inflated toy.

A car pulled up to the curb. We glimpsed our mother’s boyfriend as he dropped her off — a dark mass of lust and need who kissed her in the car and drove away. Don’t bring me down, I pray. My mother came in wearing a pantsuit that was too short for her high heels. Her eyes looked like her leaping voice, and she walked like she was trying to go three ways at once. Here was the jealous, furious one: She was wearing big earrings and lipstick, and when she hugged us, sex came off her like a smell. Her jacket flapped open, showed hide with bristles on it, then flapped back: Here was the one who lay where she fell, moaning like a cow.

But then she sat down and crisply opened the plastic menu, and here was the true one: Mom, boss of food and treats. Our minds went blank and our bodies remembered when we were little: She was the one who bought us our first milk shakes. She carried them out to the car, holding all four huge shakes squeezed together in her hands. The four of us sat drinking the shakes in deep silence, until we had to get the last bit up from the bottom; then we all slurped together. The warm, close air of the car on our skin, cold sweetness in the mouth: It was a wonderful reversal of warm breast milk and cool air, and this was a breast we could all experience together. Just seeing her open the menu brought that feeling back without us knowing it. You’re just too good to be true. A slim white arm stirred the gold pudding. We went into a trance, staring at the things on the menu.

But then there were the three directions and the bristling hide. As soon as we got our food, she started talking about how hard she knew it was. How hard it had been for her not knowing whether I was alive or dead for weeks on end and getting no support from our father. She ate her rhubarb pie. She had tried her best to understand that things were different now, and she hoped we would, too.

“Do you want a divorce or not?” asked Daphne.

Inside our mother’s eyes, an expression opened like a mouth and then snapped shut while her normal mouth prissily ate the pie. “It takes time to know something like that,” she said. “A relationship of so many years is complicated.” She ate with her prissy mouth. The bristling hide swelled out.

“It’s not fair,” said Daphne.

She sat up. Under the earrings and lipstick, she was a plain woman, and she knew the dignity of plainness. “Do you judge me?” she asked quietly.

Yes, said Daphne’s face. I judge you and I hate you.

In my mind, I looked over my shoulder and pouted at a camera while the song played. Can’t take my eyes off of you. Invisible eyes on me were like an endless ribbon of sweet music. I don’t know what my face said.

“No,” said Daphne. “But I want to know if this is permanent, and so does Daddy.”

“So do I,” said our mother. “So do I.” And she looked sad. Her entire body looked sad. Daphne could do nothing against this except be sad herself.

The waitress came by with a sound of rasping and rubbing underclothes. She left the check on the table and disappeared through a swinging door. I glimpsed a bustling kitchen of steel tables and orderly movement, sandwiches and dishes laid out. A sharp-eyed little man in an apron suspiciously returned my look. What would it be like to work there?

Our mother opened her frayed wallet and wondered aloud how I’d make a living while I was writing poems.

“I could work in a restaurant. Or maybe I could be a model.”

“Right.” She sighed, got her wallet out and counted the bills carefully, figuring the tip on her fingers. “That sounds like a beautiful life.”

Inside Daphne, I felt something tremble like it would break, then hold steady.

Then came routine. My father drove Daphne and Sara to school on his way to work. I slept until noon, then got up and drank tea for hours. It was late November and light moved from room to room with the active silence of a live thing. The cat lifted her head and blinked the deep black slits, the active green of her eyes. I paced from light to shadow, feeling my way back into the fleshy place I’d torn myself from. When I got there, I’d sit in the dining room and study for the GED with the TV on the rerun channel, volume off. I used to watch these shows with my family. The black-and-white people were so full of memory and feeling that they were like pieces of ourselves, stopped in a moment and repeating it again and again, until it became an electronic shadow of the fleshy place. Sunlight ran over the table and onto the floor. I’ve touched you all day, it said, and now I have to go.

Sara would cut school and come home early, then leave. I’d see her outside, kissing some boy who’d slap her ass when he said good-bye. Or whispering to another chunky girl with saucy goblin eyes, who offered her tits to the world in a sequined T-shirt. In the street, boys rode their bikes in slow swooping curves and called to one another. I’d strain to hear them; I was afraid they were jeering at Sara. But she’d come in like a cat, with an air of adventure about her, inwardly hoarding it. She’d get some food and sit in the room with me, watching TV with one big leg slung over the arm of her chair. She didn’t ask questions about anything that had happened while I was away. She looked at me like she already knew and that it was okay. It felt good to be with her.

Once I asked my dad about her nose, and he said, “It’s broken? Are you sure?” He seemed shocked, and then he said, “Are you sure it hasn’t always been that way?” Maybe he felt like everything was broken and he didn’t have time for one more thing. Maybe that’s why Sara was so mad at him. When he would ask her to help Daphne make dinner or clean up, she’d yell, “In a minute!” and then she wouldn’t do it. Or she’d yell, “We’re not your wives, and it’s not our fault if you don’t have one!” Then she’d run upstairs, sobbing with rage, and our dad would stand there like she’d gut-punched him.

Daphne and I hated Sara for acting like this. But it was hard to hate her all the way. Her rage was like gentleness trapped and driven crazy with sticks. It was flailing and helpless. It made Daphne’s measured goodness seem somehow mean. Maybe our father felt this, too. He never chased Sara up the stairs to shout back at her. He just stood there in pain. Then later at night, I would walk by his room. He would be lying in his pajamas and Sara would be sitting on a chair at the foot of his bed, rubbing his feet. Even just walking past, I could feel her concentration; it was huge and fleshy, like her yelling. And his feeling for it was huge, too. Once I heard him say, “You have good hands, Sara. You should be a nurse.” And she said, “Thank you,” her voice small, like a child’s.

I didn’t tell them about the modeling contest. I only mentioned it to Daphne while we were driving to the store. She half-listened, because she was mainly concentrating on smoking her cigarette and dropping ash out the window. I lied and said the photographer was a guy I got high with, and it just flew by her as one more piece of sad crap.

I still thought about modeling, but it was like something I’d masturbate over without expecting it to happen: A door opened and I was drowned in images of myself, images as strong and crude as sexual ones. They carried me away like a river of electricity. Electricity is complicated, but on direct contact, it doesn’t feel that way. It just knocks you out and fries you. The door would shut and it would be gone, except for a fading rim of electric fire, an afterimage burning a hole in normal life.

But mostly, I studied, watched TV, helped with dinner, wrote, went for walks with Daphne, saw friends who were still in school. On the weekends, there were beer parties in apartments with older kids. My friend Lucia was beautiful, even though she had bad skin and bleached hair. She was three months pregnant. When she graduated, she was going to get married and work the cash register at a store where we used to steal candy. I didn’t have disdain then, and so when I told her about the contest, I lied to impress her. I said I’d slapped Gregory Carson’s face, and that John had followed me out, begging me to enter the contest. We were sitting on a concrete stoop outside an apartment complex, drinking beers and watching cars drive in and out of a strip mall across the way. She smiled without looking at me, and I knew she could tell I’d lied, and that she forgave me. Music and laughter tumbled from the apartment in a snarl. Headlights flew past Lucia’s face and she gazed into nothing with a contentment that I didn’t understand. I saw it and I fertilized it. For a second, I pictured her eating dirt. Then I went home and half-listened to my father talk about what had gone wrong with the marriage and what might be done to “bring it back together.”

I took the GED in an old elementary school classroom in Hoboken. The desks were gray linoleum; the chairs were wood. The facilitator was a big, proud man with a bulbous, veiny nose, and he held his cheap jacket open to show his stomach. The other test takers were mostly middle-aged people with bodies curled like snails crossing a road. The only other young person was a girl wearing a skirt that showed the tops of her panty hose. She glanced at me with sullen camaraderie. Then we hunched over our tests. The facilitator watched us cross the road.

When my test scores came back, my father called my mother to tell her how well I’d done. She made her boyfriend drive her over and wait outside in the car while she kissed me. My dad yelled about “that bastard sitting out there where everybody could see,” and Sara ran upstairs and slammed the door. My mother went out and told him to drive around the block. We all sat down and planned a budget for classes. I ordered course descriptions. I made ready to register. Then the letter from the agency crashed into the side of the house.