Authors: Sarah Pemberton Strong
The Fainting Room (32 page)
“How long would you have to stay?”
“What do you mean, how long? He wants me to move back, go to school there and everything. I told him I can’t, that I need to stay here, that—” she couldn’t say,
that I need to be with you
–“that I hate living in Melvin. But he doesn’t get it.”
that I need to be with you
–“that I hate living in Melvin. But he doesn’t get it.”
“He really wants you to move back there?” The dismay in Evelyn’s voice made Ingrid look up.
“That’s what I’m telling you. Yes.”
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” Evelyn said. “If you leave it will be awful. You’re my only friend here.”
She wants me to stay. She needs me here. So I can’t go.
“My life is so different now that you’re in it. If you leave, I’ll start hating it again.”
“You hate your life?”
“I mean—” Evelyn turned away and reached for the coffee percolator. “I love Ray, I love this house—” She trailed off and busied herself with pouring in the water, measuring out the coffee. Then she faced Ingrid. “I mean that it’s better with you here. With you here I can—I don’t know—breathe.”
“That’s how I feel in California. Like I can’t breathe there. It’s not just the smog.”
“It’s funny,” Evelyn said. “I always wanted to go to California. Like I told you. I used to buy movie magazines and I’d even cut out pictures of Hollywood and tape them into this scrap book I had. And here you are, you’re supposed to go and you don’t want to. Hey, maybe we should trade: I’ll go to California, and you can stay here with Ray.”
The image was upon her, a reel from an old movie: Evelyn bound for California, climbing the metal steps of an old twin-engine airplane, holding Ingrid’s luggage and the iguana cage. Then a camera pan to Ingrid, alone with Ray, Ray was kissing her the way Arthur Slade had kissed Emily Roseine,
the heat of it like a gunshot wound Mister
, and at this point the image began to skip, as if the film inside her head had come unthreaded from the projector. Unthreaded from her stomach.
the heat of it like a gunshot wound Mister
, and at this point the image began to skip, as if the film inside her head had come unthreaded from the projector. Unthreaded from her stomach.
“Hey,” Evelyn said, “don’t look at me like that. I was joking.”
I heard the noise before I knew what it was, a flash of metal behind my ear and then a fast hot pain as lights exploded in my head and I went down. And oh, Mister, whoever thinks a dame can’t double cross you never met this one. While you’re thinking she’d never hurt you you’re lying there shot and bleeding to death—
I’m going to throw up, Ingrid thought.
She ran out of the kitchen, Evelyn calling behind her, ran down the hall, she was crying again, into the first floor bathroom where she slammed and locked the door behind her, sat on the edge of the clawfoot tub and turned on the faucets, flipped up the lid of the toilet and stuck her finger down her throat.
“Ingrid? Are you all right?”
“I’m taking a bath,” Ingrid choked out.
Hysterical. Going to pieces. Just like a dame.
Hysterical. Going to pieces. Just like a dame.
“No you’re not.” Evelyn rattled the lock. “Come out of there, please?”
Ingrid lay down on the tiled floor and curled into a ball and closed her eyes.
This is what the bad stuff looks like, Mister. And bad leaves room for worse.
She wasn’t sure how much time had passed before she sat up and turned off the water. Fifteen minutes, half an hour? She leaned against the side of the tub.
When I came to, I didn’t know where I was. I was lying face down in the sand. I’d been eating sand for breakfast. I didn’t like it. I sat up. It was morning and I was alone in an empty stretch of California desert, nothing but sagebrush and saguaros around me. Nothing moved in the still, burning air, not even a lizard to keep me company and let me know I wasn’t the only living thing left in the world.
A hard place, the California desert. Anyone who thinks it’s beautiful has another home to go back to.
“Ingrid?” said Evelyn’s voice.
Oh no, Evelyn was still out there; she must have been sitting on the other side of the bathroom door the entire time.
“What,” Ingrid said, now feeling embarrassed.
“Please open the door.”
Ingrid flipped back the latch but left the door shut. “Open it yourself if you want to.”
Evelyn opened the door, came in and sat down on the toilet seat. She didn’t speak. Whenever she herself had gone to hide in bathrooms, part of the appeal had been the quiet. After a while, Ingrid reached for some toilet paper and blew her nose, then looked up at Evelyn.
“You okay?” Evelyn asked.
Ingrid shrugged.
“I spent half my first marriage hiding in a bathroom a quarter this size. This one’s a lot nicer.”
“Hiding why?”
“Why do you think?” Evelyn said. “My husband was a drunk. I got tired of getting socked all the time.”
Ingrid raised her head and Evelyn saw a look of satisfaction flicker across her tear-stained face.
“I knew it,” Ingrid said. “When I first saw that scar on your hand, the one the tiger made, I thought it was something your husband did. And that that was why you always wore long sleeves, because you had other scars, like if he used to beat you up all the time.”
Evelyn put her head to one side. “You bothered to think all that about me?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, I just thought it. So it’s true, you wear long sleeves because you have scars?”
“You’re a good guesser. But no, not scars, exactly.”
Show her,
the ghost of Joe Cullen urged.
Show her what I did for your body. How I made you someone.
the ghost of Joe Cullen urged.
Show her what I did for your body. How I made you someone.
Evelyn pulled the rubber band free from the tucked-over sleeve of her blouse. Drum roll, please, she was doing it, she pushed the blue cotton up over her elbow and there, laaadies and gennntlemennn, an orange Japanese-style carp swimming through turquoise water and dark green lily pads.
Ingrid sucked in her breath. Let it out.
Evelyn saw something shadowy get up and leave Ingrid’s face, saw the crack of light fall across it instead, saw Ingrid’s mouth open like a door.
“Oh,” Ingrid said softly. “Oh.” She looked up at Evelyn. “They’re beautiful.” Her hand made a little involuntary movement in her lap, like a child reaching for something shiny. “Why keep them hidden?”
Evelyn made a snorting sound. “You don’t know the answer to that one? Ray’s friends, and his colleagues, they can’t stand me anyway; they think I’m an idiot. This would really be the end. ‘A tattooed lady, he married a tattooed lady.’”
“It’s not just your arm then? How high do they go?”
Evelyn unbuttoned the top two buttons of her blouse, opened the collar. A rose entwined in thorns, two butterflies holding a banner that read “forever,” and poking up from beneath her loosened collar, the bright orange tips of the sun’s rays.
“But…but….” Ingrid said. And stared some more. “But they’re beautiful. Are they all over your back and stuff too?”
“Yeah. Joe did them.” Evelyn rebuttoned her collar. “So now you know.”
“Could I—” Ingrid started, but cut herself off.
Could I see them
she was dying to say, but would the words come out meaning only that? Or would they give away the other thing, that
see them
meant
touch them
; that
touch them
meant
touch you
.
Could I see them
she was dying to say, but would the words come out meaning only that? Or would they give away the other thing, that
see them
meant
touch them
; that
touch them
meant
touch you
.
Could I touch you.
Ingrid looked at the re-buttoned blue blouse that hid the key to everything and said instead, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Evelyn traced her finger over the tiles on the wall. “At first it was because I didn’t want you to think I was some kind of freak.”
Evelyn spoke the last word, freak, so sharply that it hooked inside Ingrid and stayed there, tugging. What did that make her, Ingrid? The chain reaction that occurred inside her each time Evelyn touched her, the secret of fusion, the endlessly multiplying power, did that make Ingrid a freak too? Was that what Evelyn would think she was?
“And then after,” Evelyn was saying, “I guess I didn’t want you to know about the tattoos because I didn’t want you looking at me and thinking ‘she’s got tattoos,’ all the time. I mean, I have them, but there’s more to me than that. Hey, hello? Where’d you go?”
“Um, nowhere.” Ingrid looked away from the only bit of tattoo still visible, the blue-green edge of a pond and the gold tip of a fin on Evelyn’s arm. She looked instead at the white tiles on the floor, but the tattoo’s afterimage wavered there too, the pond now red-orange, the fish green. Evelyn must know what she was feeling; her face was so hot it was going to melt.
Say something to make her think you don’t want to rip off her stupid blouse and tattoo her with your tongue, something to make her think you aren’t a freak of nature.
“I wouldn’t mind having some tattoos myself,” she said.
Which, as soon as she said it, she realized was true.
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” said Evelyn, as if they were having a normal conversation. Just as if Ingrid were simply an ordinary girl sitting on the bathroom floor beside her making ordinary girl talk.
“Why?” Ingrid tried to sound like an Ordinary Girl.
“Because people will always look at you a certain way once they know you have tattoos, and then they make judgments.”
“But that’s the point,” Ingrid said fiercely, “I
am
a certain way, don’t you see? I
am
different.” Oh, don’t tell her for God’s sake—“It’s like with my dad’s girlfriend,” she went on hastily, “Linda doesn’t understand why I dress the way I do. She thinks I’d be so much prettier if I’d dress in, like, pink alligator shirts and tennis skirts or something. But then I might as well not exist, because you’d look at me but you wouldn’t see me at all. She thinks I dress like I do just to bug her, or to make some statement or something, but the only statement is that I’m different from her, and I’ll never be who she wants me to be, and she should just get that. And if I had tattoos, then maybe she would see, because they’d be permanent, they wouldn’t be something she’d think I would just change out of if she keeps nagging me enough—” Ingrid broke off, pressed her lips together.
am
a certain way, don’t you see? I
am
different.” Oh, don’t tell her for God’s sake—“It’s like with my dad’s girlfriend,” she went on hastily, “Linda doesn’t understand why I dress the way I do. She thinks I’d be so much prettier if I’d dress in, like, pink alligator shirts and tennis skirts or something. But then I might as well not exist, because you’d look at me but you wouldn’t see me at all. She thinks I dress like I do just to bug her, or to make some statement or something, but the only statement is that I’m different from her, and I’ll never be who she wants me to be, and she should just get that. And if I had tattoos, then maybe she would see, because they’d be permanent, they wouldn’t be something she’d think I would just change out of if she keeps nagging me enough—” Ingrid broke off, pressed her lips together.
“What?”
Ingrid shook her head. “I can’t go back there. I can’t. But if I miss the wedding my dad’ll be furious and then there’s definitely no way he’ll let me go back to school at Newell.”
“Maybe Ray and I could talk to him,” Evelyn said. “You know, tell him what a great kid you are and stuff, and how good your behavior has been this summer and how important it is for you to stay at your same school. Ray’s good at that kind of thing.”
At the mention of Ray, Ingrid felt her stomach tighten. Her lips burn. Eyes flood.
“Don’t cry again, honey, here.” Evelyn pulled a handful of toilet paper from the roller and handed it to Ingrid. “We’ll work it out. Jeez, Miss Waterworks you are.”
Ingrid sniffled. “Could we go somewhere today? Like just get in the Olds and drive for a while?”
“The Olds had to be towed to the mechanic’s this very morning,” Evelyn said. “And guess what? The whole transmission has to be rebuilt. I knew it wasn’t just fluid.”
“Well, let’s go for a walk, then.”
“I have to take the train into Cambridge later this afternoon—I have a hair appointment. Why don’t you come with me then? Maybe the salon can, you know, do something with your head.”
“Thanks, but think I’ll pass.”
“Oh, come on. You could just come and keep me company. After my haircut, Ray’s going to pick me up, and if you come along, we could all go to the movies or something, take your mind off the stuff with your dad.”
Sitting in a dark movie theater sandwiched between Evelyn and Ray? Ingrid shook her head no.
“I guess I don’t feel like going anywhere after all. I know, why don’t you cancel your hair appointment and just stay here—I could cut your hair for you.”
Evelyn laughed and ran her hand over Ingrid’s freshly shorn head. “I think you and I have different ideas of fashion.”
“Yeah,” said Ingrid, quivery as Evelyn’s fingernails sent a light shower of sparks down through her scalp. “Different.”
20.
Five hours after stumbling out of Ingrid’s room in the middle of the night, Ray walked in the door at Dunlap and Scott. He was in a kind of trance born of three hours of sleep and the feeling, for the first time in his life, that he was afraid of himself, afraid of what he was capable of doing. Nothing seemed real or familiar except the anxiety in his chest. The papers on his desk—drawings and schedules and yellow post-it notes everywhere—seemed to exist behind an invisible barrier that was kept him from interacting with them. He picked up pieces of paper and put them down again, unable to concentrate on anything long enough to remember what he was supposed to do with it.
At lunchtime he went out, wandered around for forty minutes and came back in without having eaten. As he passed the front desk, Joanne handed Ray a note from Dunlap, summoning him to the corner office in an hour.
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