The Fainting Room (16 page)
Authors: Sarah Pemberton Strong
But now Ingrid looked up at her and offered something that might even be construed as a smile, if you could call a smile that sideways thing where only half her mouth moved. Evelyn decided to take the risk of saying what she actually thought.
“I guess,” she said, “that since I grew up reading about all these movie stars and stuff in magazines—” she waved at the one in her lap and a little self-conscious laugh escaped—“you kind of just want to see Los Angeles and Hollywood and all that for yourself, you know?”
Ingrid took the cigarette out of her mouth. “Yeah, I guess I do,” she said. “When I lived in Melvin, I was always trying to get to L.A. too, by running away on my bike. Not to see movie stars, though. I wanted to go to this punk club called the Hong Kong Café.”
Evelyn had been wondering something about Ingrid for a while, and now seemed like the moment to ask it. She paused, trying to figure out how to phrase it so Ingrid wouldn’t be offended, and then ventured, “Is that why you dress like, you know, like what they call punk—because you love the music?”
Ingrid felt herself bristle in irritation. It was too much like the kind of thing her father’s girlfriend Linda asked:
Why do you have to go out of the house dressed like that
? Ingrid looked down at her clothes—black jeans she’d cut off above the knee and a black Suicidal Tendencies tee shirt whose sleeves had been razored away. She chewed her unlit her cigarette and tried to remember her objective.
Why do you have to go out of the house dressed like that
? Ingrid looked down at her clothes—black jeans she’d cut off above the knee and a black Suicidal Tendencies tee shirt whose sleeves had been razored away. She chewed her unlit her cigarette and tried to remember her objective.
Play nice, Slade. Don’t antagonize your witness. I’m dressed
She knew what she would have said to Linda:
I’m dressed like this because I accidentally flushed all my alligator shirts down the toilet.
But the look on Evelyn’s face didn’t seem judgmental so much as curious, like maybe she really wanted to know. So what was the real reason?
I’m dressed like this because I accidentally flushed all my alligator shirts down the toilet.
But the look on Evelyn’s face didn’t seem judgmental so much as curious, like maybe she really wanted to know. So what was the real reason?
“I guess at first,” Ingrid said slowly, “I started wearing the tee shirts because I liked the bands. Not just the music but what they were saying. Like, wake up, stop pretending that everything’s fine when it isn’t. So then the clothes—you know, all the black and the combat boots and the thrashed leather and shaving your head and stuff—it felt more...well, more honest.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, there were all these girls at my school in Melvin, including this girl who’s the daughter of my dad’s girlfriend, and they’re all running around like, concerned about blow drying their bangs correctly, and whether they have this new shade of Bonne Bell lip gloss, and agonizing over it, like the idea was that some boy might like them more if they had the new raspberry flavor, and it was all so totally mundane and stupid that it just made me feel kind of sick. And I didn’t want anyone to think I was like that.”
Evelyn laughed, but not meanly. “I don’t think anyone does,” she said.
“No,” Ingrid agreed, “they probably don’t.” She pulled up a handful of grass and threw it away again. “Now they just think I’m weird.”
“But that’s what you want them to think, isn’t it?”
“Well, no. I mean, I don’t want them to think anything. It’s just, you know, I guess some people just naturally fit in and others don’t. And I would feel like I was a big fake if I tried to go around dressing like—well, like you. Not there’s anything wrong with that,” she added hastily, lest Evelyn be offended, “it’s just that that’s the way you are, so it matches you, but for me it somehow doesn’t.”
“Oh, boy.” Evelyn tossed the magazine onto the lawn. “If you only knew.”
“What?”
If you only knew what’s under these pastels
, Evelyn thought, but said aloud, “Do you know what I went through to get these clothes?”
, Evelyn thought, but said aloud, “Do you know what I went through to get these clothes?”
“A Filene’s basement sale,” Ingrid said.
“It was Jordan Marsh, but what I meant was, when I first moved up here—” She paused a moment. Why was she telling Ingrid this? It’s not safe, said a small voice inside her. But there was another voice there too; a voice, she realized, that was desperate to have a normal conversation with a girlfriend, to talk about real things, not one of those exchanges with Ray’s friends that always felt like a contest she could never win.
“When I went to meet Ray for our second date,” Evelyn continued, “I had to borrow a dress from a girl down the hall just to have something to wear. I was from down south, and I didn’t have much money, and I didn’t have anything for cold weather, let alone fancy.”
“So what were you doing up here?”
“Oh—” Evelyn paused. “Working in a beauty salon. Called Hollywood, actually, the Hollywood House of Beauty. Which I guess is funny, because it wasn’t a glamorous place at all, it was what you said—scuzzy.”
Ingrid laughed, a real laugh, a friendly laugh. “See?” she said. “I know what I’m talking about. So hey, if you cut hair and stuff, maybe you could shave my head sometime. I always nick myself when I do it.”
Evelyn said nothing, thinking, Why on earth would you want to shave your head, and will you keep being nice to me if we keep talking, or is this some kind of trick and I should get up now and enjoy this feeling of having a girlfriend before it bursts and ends?
She had lost the thread of the conversation. What were they talking about? “I didn’t cut hair,” she said finally. “I did manicures.”
“Where’d you learn that?”
“I’ve always known how to do it. My mother used to do manicures in the wintertime when we weren’t—when we needed extra money. But I quit when I married Ray.”
“Why?”
Oh, Ingrid knew nothing about the world, Evelyn thought, nothing at all if she did not know the answer to that.
“It must have been boring,” Ingrid guessed.
No, boring was not the reason she’d quit. In fact she’d missed the companionship of the other girls in the salon; though she hadn’t talked with them much, she knew they had the same problems she did: not enough money, boyfriends or husbands that drank or ran around, dreams that weren’t likely to come true any time soon. Half their clientele had been hookers. No, she had quit because when she married Ray it became an impossible juxtaposition: there was no way she was going to live in this beautiful house in Randall and then go to work in a salon in the Combat Zone.
“I didn’t need the money any more,” Evelyn said. “And like I said, it was scuzzy. It was right near a bunch of strip clubs.”
“Really.” Ingrid thought this over. Then she said, “But why’d you come up here from the south? I mean, people don’t move to Boston just so they can give manicures.”
To buy time, Evelyn reached for her magazine. To tell Ingrid about the circus would feel like too much of an exposure, but she did want the two of them to go on talking like this. It felt as if, with each successful back and forth, a tiny bit of pressure escaped from her and her face felt softer, her chest more able to breathe. She looked down at the magazine, at Faye Dunaway’s inscrutable marble face and said, “I was up here in Boston after my first husband died. I came up here to find his family.”
“Your first husband died?” Ingrid was impressed. “Wow. I mean, I’m sorry, that’s sad.” She pulled up another handful of grass and studied it.
Life: Complicated
. “Did he have cancer or something?”
Life: Complicated
. “Did he have cancer or something?”
“No, he died in an accident,” Evelyn said. Thinking as she said it what an understatement it was—he had
lived
in an accident. A long series of accidents, all blurring into one big continuous one.
lived
in an accident. A long series of accidents, all blurring into one big continuous one.
“What kind of accident?” Ingrid asked.
“He fell down some steps and broke his neck.”
Ingrid sat all the way back in the grass. “Jeez. That’s awful. Did he just like,
trip,
or what?”
trip,
or what?”
Evelyn felt a small shudder travel through her. She had said too much about it already.
“My goodness,” she said, “how did we get onto this depressing subject when we were talking about California?”
“People say that if you talk about a tragedy, you feel better,” Ingrid said.
“Who says that?”
“You know, therapists and stuff. When my mom died I had to go to a bunch of child psychologists to make sure I was, you know, ‘adjusting to the trauma.’”
“Your mother’s dead?” Evelyn was startled. She looked at Ingrid—the awful hair, the ragged clothes, the safety pins in the ears—through this new lens of dead mother. “Gosh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know that. You’d think the school would have told us.”
“It’s okay.” Ingrid threw her chewed cigarette in the grass and shook another one out of the package. “I barely remember her. She died when I was four. She had cancer.”
“How sad.”
“I guess so. Like I said, I barely remember her. It was worse for my dad. I mean, he lost his wife. Well, I guess you know what that’s like if your husband died. Do you think it was worse that he died suddenly? I mean, my dad at least had time to prepare.”
“Actually,” Evelyn said, “when he died we were kind of separated. I was going to divorce him—he was killing himself with drink.”
“‘Killing himself with drink?’ You mean he was drunk when he fell?”
“Killing yourself with drink is an expression,” Evelyn said, surprised she knew this and Ingrid didn’t. “But yes, he was drunk when he fell. He was drunk all the time.”
She picked turned a page of the magazine, scrutinized a toothpaste ad. As if she had just been asked the time of day on a bus and now, obligation discharged, could go back to reading.
Ingrid didn’t take the hint. “So how did it happen?”
“I don’t like to think about it,” Evelyn said. She looked down at the blue and white-striped toothpaste arranged in a curl on the toothbrush, stopped seeing it. There was Joe, staggering on the aluminum steps outside the trailer in the rain. The smell of mud and dirty carpet, the sour beer smell of his breath. The noise. As if it were all still happening.
“I don’t like to think about my mom too much now either,” Ingrid said. “It’s kind of depressing. But when I was little I thought about her all the time.”
She paused, and Evelyn looked up from the rainy night and the drunk but still-alive Joe.
Ingrid took this as encouragement, and continued: “I used to worry that if I hugged my father when he came home from the lab at night, the radiation from his experiments would rub off on my skin and get into my bones the way it got into the bones of my mother. But I never told anyone that, so nobody could figure out why I wouldn’t let my dad hug me. So I had to go to the psychologist.”
“Ingrid,” said Evelyn, “that’s so sad.” On impulse, she reached out and stroked Ingrid’s arm. “That’s just the saddest thing.”
At the feel of Evelyn’s palm sliding the length of her forearm, Ingrid felt a jolt of electricity that was like nothing she’d ever experienced. An electric shock she’d once gotten came close. But then in the aftermath of Evelyn’s touch came a light delicious quiver, like the first drag of a cigarette you’ve been wanting to smoke for hours. A relief, an exhalation, a yes. But now her face was burning red, and the relief became a queasy jitter, like when she drank too much coffee. What was going on?
Mister, someone had slipped me a Mickey. The room started spinning. I’d heard the Soviets had something like this they gave their moles to keep them in line. The last thing I saw before I blacked out was her face—
Behind them, the screen door of the kitchen opened. Ingrid looked toward the sound of the door, feeling dazed.
“Hello ladies,” Ray called. He came down the steps of the deck and across the lawn and kissed Evelyn on the forehead. “Anyone want to take a ramble up to the ridge and watch the sunset?”
“Me,” Ingrid said, and jumped up, eager to get away from whatever it was that had just happened to her.
“And you, sweetheart?”
Evelyn closed the magazine, opened it again. It had been so nice talking to Ingrid, and now here was Ray, who would want to walk up the path to the ridge telling her the names of all the trees and whether they were coniferous or the other kind, who would want to sit on the top of the ridge and talk about what a crime it was that they were erecting a housing development on something that used to be called Kendall Farms, who would want to say the clouds were cumulo-something, and then Ingrid would join in and it would be back to business as usual.
“I have to clean up,” she said to Ray. “You two go.”
“The dishes are being power-scrubbed even as we speak, so let’s all three take a walk.”
“No,” said Evelyn forcefully, “there’s still the kitchen floor. I want to mop it.”
“Is having a floor clean enough to eat off of better than watching a sunset?” Ray asked. “Seriously, I was thinking about this anyway: let’s hire someone to come in twice a week. There’s no reason you should be knocking yourself out.”
“Is there something wrong with the way I’m doing it?” Evelyn asked.
“No, of course not.”
“If there is, tell me.”
Ray stifled a huff of exasperation. “You’re a very thorough and conscientious housekeeper,
and
there’s no need for you to do it when we can afford to pay a cleaning lady. You could do any number of other things in your free time instead—whatever you wanted, you know, take a class or something. In any case, you don’t
have
to do it, that’s all I meant. Just think about it.”
and
there’s no need for you to do it when we can afford to pay a cleaning lady. You could do any number of other things in your free time instead—whatever you wanted, you know, take a class or something. In any case, you don’t
have
to do it, that’s all I meant. Just think about it.”
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