And Again (24 page)

I realize, too late, that she doesn’t understand that I’m already pregnant. She thinks I’m asking her whether or not I should try. I start back down the street, making her follow. Connie catches up to me halfway down the block.

“Why would you even ask me?” she asks.

“What do you mean?” I pull the collar of my coat up around my throat. The temperature is dropping and I feel a bit feverish. I think back to when I was pregnant with Katie, how my temperature ran high for a month before I figured out that I wasn’t fighting off a virus.

“You have your mind made up already, don’t you? Why would you want my opinion?” Connie asks.

“I wanted your opinion because I thought we were friends,” I reply, though I know it’s petty and unfair of me. She grabs my arm then, pulling me toward a bench out of the streaming path of people walking down Michigan Avenue. People are ice skating at Millennium Park, making the most of the lingering cold, winding in lazy circles around the rink as a cheesy song from the eighties plays in the background. A song that seems familiar, though I can’t place
it. I can’t remember how I know it. This is how music is, now. Even when I can remember a song’s lyrics, its melody, it never takes me back. I never feel anything when I hear it.

“We
are
friends,” she says, looking up at me, and it’s the first time I realize that I’m taller than she is. Her face is intent on mine. “We are friends,” she repeats, her cold hand clasping mine. I get an odd sort of sexual thrill out of it, a feeling so potent I have to take a deep breath to crush it back down. “Which is why I think you asked me so I would talk you out of this.

“You just got control back,” she continues. “For the first time in eight years, this body is yours. Do you really want to give that up so soon?” Her hand is still in mine, and I’m so dumbfounded by this, by the weight of my uncertainty, that all I can do is get angry. I wrench my hand away from her.

“Maybe I thought you’d be happy for me, that I’m getting on with my life,” I say, wanting to tell her that it’s too late. That it’s too late, and now I wish I could take it back. So all I can do is defend it. “But you don’t want any of us to move on, do you? Because you don’t have anything else.”

Connie doesn’t say anything to this. She just turns and begins to walk again, but I don’t follow. I watch her back as she moves, the perfect delicacy of her limbs, the slope of her shoulders underneath her wool coat, and it feels like a part of my secret world, the beautiful place, has cracked off and pulled away from me, an iceberg splintering under the heat of the sun. And once again, the horizons of my life seem to constrict around me.

When I get home I head straight to the attic. On the days when I’m alone, when Tom is locked up in his office and the kids are at school, I scale those dusty steps and kneel down on the floor and retrieve my artifacts from their dark little home. I do this now, because my conversation with Connie has left me shaken, left me feeling feverish and disconnected from the world inside me.

I lay them out in front of me, my treasures. There’s the wrapper from the candy bar. I flattened it out, the perfect silver foil of it, between two books from the shelves downstairs, like pressing a flower to preserve its beauty. There’s the little metal-and-glass saltshaker from the pizza place where we ate a few weeks ago, which left a dusting of gritty white crystals in the seam at the bottom of my purse. Next to it is a pair of earrings from the trashy little jewelry store in the mall where Tom bought Katie a basketball pendant for Christmas. They’re little ladybugs, red with black spots, and they looked like a pair of forbidden apples tempting me from their rotating metal rack. I was surprised how easy that one was, considering the mirrored ceiling and the hawk-eyed salesgirls. Though, of course, they were keeping a much closer eye on the teenagers bopping around the store than on me. There are other things too, a pen, a votive holder, some 9-volt batteries, a tester bottle of perfume from the cosmetics stand at a department store.

I spread them out on the floor and run my fingers over them, reveling in the sweet tingle that erupts within me like the baking soda and vinegar volcano Jack made for science class. Connie’s words grow dim, eclipsed by the remembered thrills of all these pilfered items. Just looking at them lights up something inside me, as keen and sharp as a memory.

I use the last of my final disability check to book an airline ticket to Los Angeles. The fact that it was my final two hundred dollars made the decision, which I had been ignoring ever since the transfer, suddenly unavoidable. I’d spent the past few years living on the paltry sum I received from the government for being too sick to hold down any substantial sort of employment, subsisting on ramen noodles and peanut butter bought with food stamps, wearing my clothes until they were threadbare in my tiny, dirty apartment. But even I can’t live on nothing, and I’m not about to endure my landlord’s greasy stare, his innuendos and loaded suggestions, if I have to beg for an extension on my rent.

At 5 a.m. I take the Blue Line to O’Hare, dressed in the only outfit I have left fit for such an errand, a white shift dress and ancient Christian Louboutins that I could never bear to get rid of, with their four-inch heels and snakebite-red soles. It’s a classic sort of look, sexual in its simplicity. Hollywood glamor. It’s the outfit I was planning on being buried in.

I’m not staying over in L.A., so I carry only a purse containing lipstick, my ID, and the one credit card I have left that isn’t maxed out. That’s the thing about assuming you’re going to die, you don’t make smart financial decisions when it comes to planning for the future. Which is another reason for my trip; ever since my disability checks stopped, the creditors have begun calling. I glance at my reflection in the glass of the train window as we dip underground. I look jagged and fierce, a version of myself that is a little sharper-jawed and sunken-cheeked, something like the way I
looked when I was sick. The image is ghastly and too familiar, all of that beauty spoiled by poor lighting and murky glass.

When we reach O’Hare, I check in at my terminal and begin snaking my way through the security line, pulling off my sunglasses as a blue-gloved TSA agent scrutinizes my ID photo, glancing back and forth between the card and my face. I know what she sees, a woman who is undeniably the same, yet nearly completely different from the photograph. Any sign of my age has disappeared, all the worldliness is gone from my face. I am blank, and pure, and alight with possibility. She seems perplexed by what she sees, but she shines a flashlight on my ID and then hands it back to me. For a moment I think she’s going to ask me the name of my plastic surgeon, but then she waves me through without a word.

My earrings set off the metal detectors, of course. And I get that familiar panicked prickle in my skin when I’m waved over to a secured area to be searched. A female TSA agent pats me down, but all of the men in the vicinity watch with wet mouths and fixed eyes. I don’t look at any of them. I show my defiance in the absolute boredom on my face. They are insects, a trifle. I show them that I submit to them only because I can’t bring myself to care enough to resist. Another familiar feeling.

I’m flying coach, which I detest, wedged into a sticky foam seat, staring out the window while the businessman next to me tries to make conversation. I ignore him, mostly. He’s not bad looking, but after all, he can’t be too impressive if his company flies him coach. Instead I play over the whole scene in my head. What I will say. How I will look, in my simple dress and my sex-kitten heels, with a fresh lick of red lipstick across my mouth. It will be all right, all of it, the greedy press of my landlord and my ringing phone and my empty mailbox. If I can look half as good as I imagine, it will be just fine.

I was probably twelve when men began to notice me. They noticed my mother first, of course, because who wouldn’t notice Betts? At
least, back before she found God and let herself go. I remember sitting on the front steps of our trailer while my mother smoked a slow succession of cigarettes, the midsummer sun shimmering off the sweat that collected in the base of her throat and in the crease between her breasts. I was enthralled by her even then, the beauty of her, and my own importance in being her daughter.

“Don’t slouch,” she’d say, glancing at me out of the corner of her eye before going back to observing the rows of trailers that surrounded us, like a monarch surveying her kingdom. “You remember those ballerinas on TV? Those are the rarest sort of women in the world. Rich people pay obscene sums of money to sit there and watch them move. Imagine two thousand pairs of eyes on you, and you never have to say a word. Imagine being that powerful. Do you think they slouch when they sit down?”

I’d shake my head, straightening my spine until my back ached with the effort. What would two thousand pairs of eyes feel like? Even one pair often felt like too much, especially when it was Larry, who lived across the way with his small pack of Dobermans. I could feel him looking at me, the nicotine-stained fingers of his hand scratching across the round sack of his belly as he watched me leave for school in the mornings. It was a hot feeling, being watched by him. Like breaking out in hives. Two thousand pairs of eyes felt like an impossible number. I imagined splintering apart under the press of all that attention. But even then, there was a part of me that grew excited at the thought. There was already a part of me that reveled in the idea of being wanted that badly.

After a while it wasn’t just Larry. There was Hank, whom my mother hired whenever the plumbing in the trailer wasn’t working, which was nearly all the time. Later in my teens I’d point out to my mother that Hank probably didn’t know what the fuck he was doing, considering the pipes seemed to always be broken, no matter how many times he fixed them. And later still, it would occur to me that Hank probably had a stake in keeping those pipes in poor shape. But at twelve, doing my homework at the card table in
our kitchen or lounging on the couch watching TV, I wasn’t sure why I’d suddenly been caught within the focus of Hank’s gaze. He’d whistle under his breath as he clanked around under the sink, and he’d call from the kitchen to ask me for a glass of water from the tap in the bathroom. He’d look up at me when I obliged him, from his place on the floor, and I’d feel ten feet tall hovering over him and handing him the glass. He had a blond goatee that was flecked with gray, and he wore square glasses with silver frames. I’m sure I’d find him very attractive now, but back then I never did know what to think.

“Does your mother let you out of the house wearing that?” he’d say, motioning to my shorts, cut off so high on my legs that white triangles of pocket hung below the frayed edges of the denim. I’d shrug, snap my gum. I wasn’t much for talking back then, trying to have no use for words. “What kind of music do you listen to? You like Johnny Cash?”

He started bringing me mix tapes when he came over, labeled in black marker, and I’d play them in my mother’s boom box while he worked. It was a lot of country, which I didn’t much care for, but there would be the odd song by the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin that I’d recognize.

“Dance, Chicklet,” he’d say, using the pet name he’d chosen for me. I didn’t know if it was because he called all the women in the trailer park “chicks,” and I was a miniature version of them, or if it had something to do with the gum I always chewed. I never did ask. I never danced for him either, but I did bring him water, and I’d stand there as he drank it, feeling him watch me as he swallowed it down, feeling like I was a tacit participant in an exchange I didn’t fully understand.

The women in the trailer park, the ones who didn’t have husbands, or who had husbands who weren’t worth a damn, used to talk about Hank like he belonged to them. I’d leave my window open at night and listen to my mother and her friends tease him in the dark as he walked home from the bar down the road, their voices making
the night wind feel even slower, even hotter, as it drifted in through my screen. I used to imagine myself talking to men that way, with those long, heavy tones. I’d listen to him tease them back, his voice a bit too loud, and listen to their laughter. I wondered if I belonged to him the way he belonged to them, if there was a pecking order and I was at the end of it. He fixed the sink when my mother asked, and when he asked I brought him water and stood there as he looked at me. I wondered if desiring something made it yours already, just a little, simply through the act of wanting it.