Look at me: (4 page)

I had thought it would be hard to make new friends, but it turned out that Ellen and I were neutralized by our disunion to the same degree that we’d been empowered by our accord. Eventually we settled down with boyfriends and went to proms and even signed each other’s yearbooks—
Good luck with everything!
—and except in the most abstract sense, I forgot about that night.

I did pay one last visit to Ellen’s house. This time with Moose, who graduated from Michigan and returned to Rockford to work for his father. I picked him up my senior year at a state championship hockey game, where he was watching teenage boys scramble over the ice. By then Moose’s aura of fame had shrunk; even the youngest siblings of the kids who had revered him were gone, and East High, where once he’d reigned, no longer knew of his existence. He was still living at home, and I followed him up the dark familiar stairs, past the master bedroom where his invalid mother spent her days, past Ellen’s empty room (she was a year older than I, and had already left for college) to his own attic lair: faded sports posters loosening from the walls, dusty trophies lining shelves. There was a seriousness about Moose that I hadn’t remembered. As we sank onto his bed, I noticed a series of ropes and pulleys connected to a box attached to the ceiling. I asked what they were. “Nothing,” he told me. “Some old stuff I outgrew.”

When it was over he faded into a doze. I stared at him, the bulky shoulders, the slightly purplish cast of his eyelids; this locus of so many years of cumulative envy and mystery, idolatry and myth, now prone, snoring lightly into a pillow.

His eyes opened. “What?” he said, groggy.

“You,” I said.

He looked puzzled, and raised himself onto an elbow.

“Just … Moose,” I said, shaking my head. “Moose. Moose Metcalf. I can’t believe it.”

He grinned, uneasy. He knew exactly what I meant. Wind filled the bedroom from his tiny window.

“Actually, my name is Edmund,” he said.

I was not a nostalgic person. I didn’t save Christmas cards, rarely took pictures, felt mostly indifferent to the snapshots people sent me. Until the accident, I had always thought my memory was bad, but in fact I’d thrown the past away, a ream of discarded events—so that I could move, unencumbered, into the future. Now, as I made my limping way among the tall bare trees toward Ellen Metcalf’s house, it was not with the intention of losing myself in misty-eyed recollections of my old friend, but to see the house now. To learn what it, and if possible she, had become.

The Metcalf manse was a rambling Tudor style that has always been popular among the midwestern rich. The lawn still impressed me, wide and lush despite the scorching summer that had just passed. On the grass were sundry child-oriented items: a bat, a large plastic gun, a smallish fluorescent orange bike. What age child they denoted I had no idea. I touched my face, stuccoed with Mary Cunningham’s thick, flower-scented pancake. I was still badly bruised; rather than fading, it seemed, my bruises simply changed color, like fireworks whose finale won’t arrive. I felt darkly conspicuous; a dour visitor, a drug-ravaged starlet incognito.

The area behind the house had been re-landscaped; flower beds shaped like lima beans blossomed with wine-colored begonias. I stood on the flagstone patio and listened to the silence. I went to the screen door that led to the kitchen—the door Ellen and I had always used—and gently tapped. I rang the bell. When it was clear that no one was home, I opened the door and went in.

The difference shocked me; I remembered the kitchen as a dark room with greenish walls and high windows that made you feel you were straining to see the sky from the bottom of a well. Now the windows were wide and lower down, and the room had been opened up, cracked wide so you saw light and sky and green lawn spotted with piles of raked leaves. Very California, I thought, tapping my heels against the pizza-colored floor tiles, with an impressive array of beaten copper pots dangling above the stove.

And if someone comes home? I asked myself, ascending the front stairs after a glance at the living room, where modern art had commandeered the walls. But I wasn’t afraid. I felt shielded—protected, somehow, by my dark glasses and mask of makeup, the silk headscarf tucked into the top of my trenchcoat to hide the bruises on my neck. This isn’t me, I thought, rounding the stairs and emerging into the upstairs hallway, whose crisp walls and luminous floors effaced all traces of its former dreariness. How could I be caught, when I didn’t look like anyone? As a model, of course, I’d carried my face like a sign, holding it out a foot or so in front of me—not out of pride or vanity, God knew; those had been stamped out long ago, or at any rate, disjoined from my physical appearance. No, out of sheer practicality: here’s what I am. Calling card, handshake,
précis
, call it what you like; it was what I had to offer to the world where I had spent my life.

I was heading for the master bedroom, a room I’d glimpsed only when Ellen would go in or out, a shadowy peek, a gust of scented air, her mother’s hushed, plaintive voice. Now the door was open. I went in. The room was immense and spare, bars of sunset angling through wood blinds that looked custom-made. There were big ficus trees and a modern-looking bed with long delicate posts. The walls were yellow-white. In a plush adjacent dressing room I smelled one of the Chanels, but my damaged nose could not distinguish which. Long mirrors, walls covered with framed photographs. I went closer to look—I wasn’t yet allowed to wear my contacts—curious about the family who lived here now. Instantly I recognized Ellen, aged by many years but still beautiful, the bones even stronger in her face. She was standing on a beach with a man at her side, her husband, presumably, who looked ten years older and had the tanned skin and white teeth of a German.

Ellen Metcalf. I was in Ellen Metcalf’s dressing room.

Straining to focus my bleary eyes, I studied other pictures: Ellen lounging with her husband in some foreign clime; the squashed face of a newborn; some youthful photos of Ellen’s parents done in the manner of Hollywood stills; a montage of two children, the older a girl who—poor thing—looked nothing like her mother. I wondered if she’d been adopted. Ellen and this daughter in matching bathing suits, lying beside the country club pool. As I surveyed the whirling narrative of Ellen’s life, I began, for the first time, to feel anxiety at the thought of her coming home and finding me there. It wasn’t my trespassing that concerned me; more a basic sense that I couldn’t be seen this way.

I decided to go. But no sooner had I left Ellen’s dressing room than I heard footsteps in the hallway outside the bedroom door. Appalled, I yanked my sunglasses over my monster-red eyes, shot back into the dressing room and hunched in a closet, gently coaxing the door shut behind me. I hid there, panting in a darkness full of filmy dresses scented with more of that mysterious Chanel, until it occurred to me that the humiliation of being caught inside a closet would surely exceed that of merely standing in a dressing room, and I flung open the closet door just as a girl of about thirteen, with earphones on her head, wandered in from the bedroom.

She jumped, then gaped at me, startled and guilty, as if she were the one who’d been caught. It was the girl from the pictures, a sadly average-looking girl with thin, drab hair and insect-like glasses on her face. She pulled off her earphones.

“Who are you?” she said.

“I’m an old friend of your mother’s,” I replied as casually as I could manage. “I was passing through town and thought I’d stop by. But I guess she’s not home.”

This flimsy pretext seemed, oddly, to satisfy her. I saw how unlike her mother she was; Ellen would have been all narrow-eyed suspicion. But this was an open, curious girl. Thank God.

“She won’t be back for a while,” she said.

“Darn,” I said, and then, because it seemed only natural, “Where is she?”

“Chicago, at the hospital.”

“Nothing wrong, I hope.”

My ignorance clearly surprised her. “Ricky had leukemia? But now he’s in remission.”

“Oh, that’s good,” I said. “That’s terrific. The house is beautiful. I haven’t seen it since your grandparents lived here.”

“I’ll show you my room, if you want.”

I followed her down the hall. She had a light, skipping step. Her room was Ellen’s old room, painted blue now and a little dark; she was one of those girls who pulls the shades and burrows in bed with a book (not the sort I ever knew well). Indeed, there was a pile of books heaped by the bed and even on top of it. The covers were mussed, as if she’d been underneath, reading.

But the place where she led me out of pride or habit was a large rectangular fishtank. The water bubbled merrily. A chair was poised beside the tank, as if the girl spent time there, watching her fish. And they were beautiful fish, I had to admit, though I wasn’t fish-inclined. The two smallest were a phosphorescent blue, like peacock feathers. “Those are damsels,” she said, seeing me notice. “Blue damselfish.”

“What’s that?” I asked dutifully, pointing at a fish with sharp prongs curved around its tail like a comma.

“An angel flame,” she said, then added proudly, “This is a saltwater tank.”

Having no idea what difference that made, I kept quiet.

The girl stood across the tank from me, eying my face through the percolating water. “Why do you wear sunglasses inside?” she asked.

“I had an accident,” I said. “A car accident.”

“I thought something happened,” she said. “Your face looks kind of strange. Does the light hurt your eyes, is that why you wear the glasses?”

“No,” I said. “They just look bad.”

“Can I see?”

“You don’t want to,” I said. “Really.”

“Yes, I do.”

She did. She wanted to see my eyes, this girl, and came back around the tank for that purpose, slim, wiry, her head about the height of my chest. I’d been wrong about her age: she was older than thirteen. She seemed almost like an adult. “Believe me,” she said, “I can handle it.”

I took off the glasses. The room wasn’t nearly as dark as I’d thought. The girl looked evenly into my eyes: the gaze of someone who has already seen her share of pain, and knows what it looks like.

“How will you look after it heals?” she asked.

“Like I looked before, more or less. These doctors, you know, they’re fantastic.”

She nodded. I had the feeling she didn’t believe me.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Charlotte,” she said.

I thought at first that I’d misheard her. I didn’t ask again—just let the surprise ricochet through me once, then dissipate. “No kidding,” I said. “Mine, too.” Right away I saw my mistake; she would tell Ellen, and Ellen would know what had happened to me.

“That’s incredible!” she said. “I don’t know any other Charlottes. Only one Charlene.”

“Charlotte is a better name.”

“I think so, too,” she said. “It’s fancy.”

There was a pause. To distract her, I asked, “And your uncle? Is he still called Moose?”

The girl smiled, blood rising to her cheeks. Same old Moose, I thought.

“You knew my uncle?” she asked, with excitement. “Before?”

“A little,” I said noncommittally. “Before what?”

“Everything that happened,” she said, and some memory grazed me, then, some disturbing thing I’d heard about Moose. I couldn’t call it back. “He’s still called Moose,” was all she said.

I had been trying, in as relaxed a manner as possible, to steer us from her room in the direction of the front stairs. But just as I began my gimping descent, just as I was beginning to rejoice at having slithered from this potential debacle without having so much as roused the suspicions of my young hostess—just then, a shadow of prudence fell over her. “Don’t you … want to leave a message? Or a note?” she asked, pattering down the stairs behind me.

“No, that’s okay.” I was struggling with the front door.

“But I—I thought you—” Even as she helped me open it, I felt the beat of worry in her, which provoked in me a corresponding guilt, as if I’d nabbed the family silver and were about to make a run for it.

“Tell your mom I’m sorry I missed—”

“What’s your—”

But I was out the door, loping across the lawn—a freakish sight that must have been—away from her.

As I hurried back to Mary Cunningham’s, I was gripped by jealousy so sharp and unexpected that it felt like sickness. I wanted that girl. She was mine, she should have been mine; even her name was mine. I wanted that house, that life; the kid with cancer—I wanted it. I wanted children, people around me. I wanted to send a young Charlotte into the world to live a different life from mine.

Such feelings of envy and remorse were so alien to me that I hardly knew how to respond. There was a voice that spoke to me at times of internal duress in exactly the way I spoke to Grace: briskly reassuring at first, and if that didn’t work, brusque to the point of bullying. All my life I had heard that voice, and when its scolding was not enough to still the fear in me, I took action—walked, danced, made phone calls—whatever was required to stop the whining. I despised whining, my own more than anyone’s.

But now I was too tired to move. I collapsed onto the daybed Mary Cunningham kept in her front room, unable yet to attempt the stairs, and decided I would inquire that very evening about the precise contents of that swank liquor cabinet I’d noticed in her living room. In the Midwest you could usually count on a decent stock, even at an old lady’s house. My face ached and throbbed; I’d stayed out too long. Upstairs, when I wiped off my pancake makeup with the special creams Dr. Fabermann had given me, my monstrous reflection looked more angry and swollen than it had in days. Like a newborn, I thought, exchanging looks with my frantic, scalded eyes—a newborn howling in pain and outrage.

I soaked a cotton pad in vitamin E oil and gently swabbed my face. I spoke to it in tones that were uncharacteristically soothing. “There, there, come on now,” I said, “it’s not so bad,” dabbing the oil on my hot skin. Everything will be fine. This is the angry healing phase, that’s all. It will end and then you’ll have a new face—your old face but new again, like Ellen’s house. This is your Charlotte, I thought, looking at myself in the mirror. This is your Charlotte, and you must take good care of her so she’ll grow up to be a beautiful girl, and live an extraordinary life.