When Roger and Ellen Ramsey found their six-month old baby facedown,
lifeless in his crib one December morning—his arms and legs splayed like a
starfish, his fingers perfect and terrible in their stillness, the soles of
his feet unbearably smooth—they both blamed themselves. Wordlessly, they
each thought back to the previous night and remembered being the one to put
Matthew to bed, remembered hurriedly singing him a bedtime song, kissing
his forehead, closing the door. They searched their minds for what went
wrong. Whatever distraction, whatever unimaginable reason there was to have
placed the baby down on his stomach instead of his back.
There was a moment after the ambulance was called, after Roger Ramsey put
one hand over his son’s nose and tried breathing life into his already cold
mouth, and Ellen Ramsey began to weep so uncontrollably that she herself
had needed medical attention—when they blamed the other. This isn’t my mistake, they each thought, as the EMTs bolted
upstairs, two steps at a time. But later, when the baby was pronounced
dead, fault became small and irrelevant. The husband and wife looked at one
another and somehow, without speaking, made the decision not to place
blame.
When the Ramseys decided to have another baby, they told themselves they
were meant to be parents. They told themselves they weren’t replacing
Matthew. When they found out it was going to be a girl, Roger Ramsey
excused himself from the room where his wife lay sprawled on the exam
table, ultrasound gel cold and nauseating on her belly, and cried in the
privacy of the bathroom. He thought about the delicacy of the little girl
they would be bringing into the world, of the utter helplessness of
children. He thought how selfish they were to be doing this again.
Ellen Ramsey listened to the heartbeat of her daughter on the ultrasound
and allowed the doctor and her husband to believe that her tears were ones
of happiness, though neither one of them asked. The little creature on the
screen—no, in her own body—did not feel like her baby.
She waited for the love she had felt for Matthew to kick in, to fill her
up.
When she gave birth to the baby and held the girl in her arms she only felt
blank and tired, the way she felt when she watched the news on TV each
night, or the rare times when her husband reached for her, or when one of
her students accidentally called her Mom before smiling shyly and
saying, Oops, I mean, Mrs. Ramsey.
When her daughter’s mouth found itself a home around her nipple, the
tug—that good sort of pain that she had felt with Matthew—seemed only
biting and selfish. Deliberate almost, as though the baby wanted to hurt
her. Get off me, she wanted to cry. But she held her daughter
dutifully to her breast and bent down to kiss her ear. She breathed in the
baby scent as though it was a drug, then waited—prayed—to feel the effect.
***
The man Jeannie Ramsey had gone home with was sexy but not especially
good-looking, Jeannie’s favorite type of man to go home with. It meant a
kind of ugliness could ensue. A letting go of niceties. Jeannie had the
ability to make herself quite lovely when she wanted to. She could clean up
nice. When she wasn’t paying attention, though—to her posture, to the
particular way she arranged her features on her face, to the angle at which
her hair fell across her forehead—something vulgar could leak through.
What was sexy about this man, she couldn’t quite put her finger on, but she
thought it might have to do with the way he smiled. It wasn’t a tool the
way it was for most people—a scheme to ask for more or to gain trust, to
appear happy and enchanting and in control, when in fact the opposite was
true. For this man, smiling was simply a reflex. He was naked, hunched over
by his desk in the corner of his room, searching for a condom. His stomach
was soft and reddish, and the places where his skin folded gleamed a little
with sweat. Sparse hair stuck out in random patches on his back, and that
hair was light-colored—surprisingly lighter than the hair on his head. When
he turned around and shook his head apologetically at Jeannie, she found
she liked the way his shoulders looked, not held haughtily like the
business types she’d been with since she’d moved to the city—men who
fancied themselves good catches—but still, his shoulders were
nice, attractive accidentally.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t believe I can’t find any.”
Jeannie stretched out along this strange, ugly sexy man’s bed and turned
her face into his starchy pillowcase, breathed in the scent of him, a cross
between pine deodorant and some sort of oat bread. She felt ravenous, then,
in a way that made her grateful for all the types of food in this world,
for the very existence of flavors.
“Your bed smells good,” she said, and she saw his reflexive smile.
His room was spare. No TV, hardly any furniture except for the bed and a
dresser and a desk with no chair. His closet didn’t have a door and the
only things hanging were a few coats and several metal hangers. Half a
dozen books were stacked on the desk. She didn’t bother reading the spines.
The idea of discussing literature with him didn’t interest her—what he
liked, what she liked—but she noted the books the same way she noted his
shoulders.
Rolling onto her stomach, she glanced at him. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m
on the pill.”
“You sure?”
She nodded, feeling as she often did, that her decisions were not really in
her control, that as soon as a possibility floated in her mind, she would
inevitably go with it. It got her places, this ability to say yes, even
when she wasn’t quite sure what she was saying yes to. It was how she had
gotten here, barely twenty-one and living on her own; here being New York
City, where millions of nobodies came together to become something massive
and throbbing, like a heart. And Jeannie was a part of that now.
It was how she had gotten her job with Dr. Anders, without a college degree
and with no office work experience. “Are you organized?” he’d asked her at
the interview. “Do you know how to use a fax machine? Do you have
experience with billing? Do you have any interest in Ophthalmology?” Yes,
yes, and yes. Each day when she answered the phone at Anders’ office she
imagined her voice floating out into the city, as though she were a spider
building her web, one word at a time. She liked answering the phone. Hello, this is Dr. Anders’ office. Jeannie speaking. She sat up
straight when she spoke and batted her eyes and said her boss’s name as
though speaking the name of a god. And then her own: Jeannie,
she’d trill, like an idiotic cartoon secretary. Jeannie speaking!
One time, Dr. Anders had poked his head in and watched her while she
chirped into the phone. “You’re good at that,” he’d said after she’d hung
up.
***
Jeannie had grown up in a small town upstate, right along the Canadian
border, where it was winter seven months out of the year and where most
people gave up on their days at around four p.m. That’s when the sun began
to set and people started to drink. Televisions were switched on and kept
on until bedtime. Most nights Jeannie’s parents fell asleep in front of the
TV and Jeannie would shake them awake before heading to bed herself. No
matter how many nights this happened, they always looked surprised to see
their daughter’s darkened form standing there in front of the glow of the
television.
Jeannie’s father worked at the pharmacy in town and her mother was a fifth
grade teacher. Her mother claimed to love children but Jeannie could see
how unhappy she was each morning as she went off to school, clutching her
bagged lunch, as though she were a student, one of the quiet ones who kept
to themselves. Her father was better at disguising his unhappiness,
something Jeannie had appreciated growing up, when they had played out in
the snowy yard together and sang songs in the kitchen. When Jeannie fell
off the swings and broke her arm, the doctor asked her to rate the pain on
a scale of one to ten. The question had baffled her—how was she supposed to
know the difference between a four and a six? A five and an eight? That’s
when it had dawned on her the type of sadness adults lived with.
Jeannie was still young when she began to notice the terrified way her
mother and father looked at her, as though her vitality was something
bizarre and dangerous. They loved her but they seemed scared of her. Once,
at a mattress warehouse sale, Jeannie’s mother found Jeannie in a far
corner of the store touching herself on a waterbed. Though at the time,
Jeannie simply thought of the thing that she was doing as some rare and
wonderful trick she had taught herself, her mother had yanked Jeannie off
the bed and they had left without purchasing the mattress they’d driven all
the way there to buy.
“What kind of six-year-old girl has those sorts of urges?” Jeannie heard
her mother say into the phone later that day. Jeannie didn’t know which
urges her mother was speaking of. The thing that Jeannie did—that
astonishing building sensation, the way it left her breathless and humming
with relief at the end—seemed so specific to her own body, that it had
surprised her that her mother seemed to know what it was. But by the way
her mother avoided looking her that day, and hesitated before kissing her
goodnight that evening, she knew what she had done was disgusting.
For years afterwards, each time one of her mother’s friends came over for
coffee, Jeannie would search their faces for some trace of revulsion,
wondering whether it was them on the phone that day. It was only when
Jeannie started high school and finally grew breasts, and her body began to
curve in all the right places, that she understood what her mother had been
so disgusted by—but that’s when she also stopped caring. Instead of
searching for looks of distaste on the faces of her mother’s friends, she
began to look for ones of jealousy.
It was then, when Jeannie’s body started to develop, that her mother’s fear
of her changed shape, became something sharp and jagged, pointed directly
at Jeannie. When she got her period, her mother bought her a box of tampons
and placed it on Jeannie’s bed along with a spare set of sheets. She had
left a note: Use these. You don’t want to bleed on the good ones.
And then, scrawled in far messier handwriting, as though she couldn’t bear
the thought of the words being true: You’re growing up!
Her father, too, had seemed disturbed by the changes in his daughter,
though in a less angry way. When he encountered Jeannie in the house, in
the hallway or during a chance meeting in the kitchen, he smiled cordially
at her, then would step back to let her pass, so as not to brush arms. One
day Jeannie started to sing one of their kitchen songs, but instead of
joining in, her father had looked up embarrassed, and then vanished.
Jeannie wondered if he hadn’t wanted to sing because her mother was in the
kitchen, though that had never stopped him before. Or, she thought, maybe
the tradition that had once been okay when she was young, was now, somehow,
too intimate for a father and daughter to share. A few weeks later when it
was just the two of them, her father had started to sing like old times. He
was loading dishes into the dishwasher and Jeannie watched him carefully
from her seat. He sang a verse, and then a second one, almost quiet enough
for it to be under his breath. When he got to the chorus, and Jeannie still
hadn’t joined in, he stopped. It seemed to Jeannie that he felt relieved.
Jeannie began avoiding her parents in a polite but prudent way, and it
seemed to make things easier for everyone. It became simpler to live her
life separately, out of the house. She found that in all of the ways her
new shape upset her parents, it captivated the boys at school. She learned
to smile a certain way. She bit her bottom lip a little. She willed her
eyes to sparkle.
It was important not to look too eager, but just interested enough. She
wore shirts that hugged her chest and she became used to boys looking at
her as though she was something they’d like to touch.
And she found she wanted to touch them too. When Todd Lerner, a boy two
years older than Jeannie, asked if she wanted a ride home after school, she
knew right away what was going to happen. He didn’t drive to her house, but
to the empty parking lot behind the bike path that ran through town. Nobody
ever really used the bike path—most of the year it was covered with snow
and ice and even during the summer months, it just sat there, an escape
from their small town that nobody wanted to admit existed.
When Todd glanced over at Jeannie and she saw that he was nervous, she
smiled—not the biting lip smile, but a real smile. She pulled off her
shirt, unhooked her bra and climbed over the console to straddle him. It
was as easy as that. She began sleeping over at different boys’
houses—first Todd’s, but then others’ too, and after a while it became
almost like a game. She would spend hours in different basements, in
different arms, teaching herself what it meant to be wanted.
It was usually when the room began to blush with morning that Jeannie would
start to feel repulsed, feel the urge to run. It was no different that
morning waking up in the ugly sexy man’s bed. His window faced the street
and Jeannie could hear the sounds of steel shutters clattering open,
traffic making its angry stop and start down First Avenue, city buses
whirring past. Next to her the man was sprawled on his stomach, one arm
circled around her middle. She leaned in and watched his eyelids, the
frantic shaking of his eyeballs underneath. The repulsion began to build
then, like a chalky residue. Images and sound clips from the night played
like a porno in her mind: Jeannie spread-eagle on the bed, the man’s face
blank and hungry like a dog’s, her legs thrown up over his shoulders, her
tongue on his calves, on his thighs, on places that had seemed at the time,
exquisitely intimate. Has anyone ever touched you here? She could
hear her voice saying those words, whispering them like a mad woman into
his ear.
She shuddered and removed his arm, placed it by his side and climbed out of
bed. Her clothing lay crumpled on the floor, her bra still inside her
shirt, her underwear still curled inside her jeans. As she pulled on her
boots and tied the laces she glanced at the books on the desk. She didn’t
recognize any of the titles.
“Heading out?” the man’s voice said. She turned around, a little scared to
face him. He was propped up on one elbow and the sheet fell off his body in
a relaxed way.
She nodded. “Gotta be at work in a few hours.”
He smiled a little and for a moment it looked like he might say something
unbearable like that was fun or when can I see you again
but all he said was, “Bye, Jeannie.”
“Bye,” she said, and gave him a little wave, then gently shut the door
behind her.
***
The subway ride after those kinds of nights always calmed her. It was a
relief to be part of the larger world again, after having been immersed in
the small, particular world of a stranger’s bed. She felt an affinity
towards the other women on the train, found that she wanted to sit near
them, to watch them, to know them. She imagined that they all shared
something private and unspoken, and once in a while she exchanged a knowing
smile with one of them, though she couldn’t quite say what it was they both
knew.
A woman across from her yawned, which made Jeannie yawn, too. She glanced
around the train to see if anyone else had caught it, but she only ended up
meeting eyes with an older man who took the opportunity to smile at Jeannie
and glance approvingly at her chest. Another shiver of repulsion pulsed
through her, causing the porno to start up again in her head. Skin slapping
skin, the rude suction cup sound of sweaty bodies pulling apart. She looked
back at the woman across from her, hopeful that the woman might smile at
her, but now the woman was facing down, her head bowed over a book.
***
By the time Jeannie reached the office, the day had turned shamelessly
sunny, not a cloud in the sky. White light blazed sharply off the mirrored
buildings and the scaffolding all along 68th shone and glinted
like painful orthodonture. Jeannie had gone back to her apartment and
showered, changed into a fresh outfit, snipped a little at her hair in the
mirror and brushed her teeth. She felt good again. The sickening feeling
faded, the night before just the blur of an unimportant memory. She could
barely recall the man’s face.
It was her responsibility to prepare the office for the day before Anders
got in. After two months at the job, she now did this expertly, removing
her heels and slipping them under her desk so that she could move around
quickly. She tidied the waiting room and replaced the water cooler with a
fresh jug. She swiped the exam room chairs and the retinal camera with
disinfectant wipes, made sure that the bathroom was equipped with toilet
paper and soap. In Anders’ office she neatened stacks of papers and fixed
the pens so they were all cap-up in the silver organizer. She examined the
two framed photographs he kept on his desk. His wife was blond and dainty,
with birdlike features, and the daughter was confident-looking and pretty
in a way that made Jeannie think of the term well-groomed. She
could imagine the long-haired, big-eyed girl in the photo straddling a
brown horse, her torso long and straight, positioned close to the horse’s
body, animal and girl squinting into the wind.
Before returning to the reception room, Jeannie toed the line in the
hallway marked with masking tape and covered her left eye, read the letters
aloud on the eye chart: E F P T O Z. She blinked several times, covered her
right eye, and read it again. When she had started the job Anders had
offered to give her a free exam and when he announced that she had perfect
vision, she had beamed, as though this was an accomplishment to be proud
of, some indication of her competence.
“Bet you don’t get a lot of twenty-twenty’s around here,” she’d said to
Anders.
He had nodded. “You are a rare breed.” Then he tapped the hinges of his own
frames. “I had to get glasses in the fourth grade. Without these I wouldn’t
even be able to make out the features on your face.”
She had blushed then, feeling as though he had said something warm by
mentioning her face.
***
The first patient that morning was Karen Greenberg, an older woman who was
experiencing pain in her left eye. Jeannie buzzed her in and Karen came
barreling into the office, blinking rapidly, a distressed expression on her
face. “I’m here for my nine-thirty appointment. Karen Greenberg.”
Her voice wobbled.
“Of course, Ms. Greenberg.” Jeannie smiled graciously at the woman. “Have a
seat.” She was used to these sorts of anxious patients, their fear thick
and palpable, like an odor that could fill up the entire waiting room.
“Eyes are personal,” Anders had said to her on her first day. “If you lose
your vision, you lose everything. It’s important to make the patients feel
like they’re being heard, that you’re taking them seriously.”
Anders walked in then. His white coat and silver glasses, the gentle yet
businesslike expression he wore on his face while interacting with
patients—it always had an effect. It was obvious to Jeannie how desperately
people wanted to be taken care of, how good it felt to be examined and
diagnosed and assured. Anders was good at that. It was why his small
practice was so successful.
“Karen,” Anders said, clapping his hands together and striding across the
waiting room.
Karen Greenberg stood, tossing a magazine on the chair next to her. She
touched one hand to her left eye, consciously or unconsciously, Jeannie
couldn’t tell, and smiled.
“Let’s take a look at that eye,” he said. “Please, after you.” He gestured
towards the hallway past the waiting room where the exam room was, and
Karen nodded gratefully, then walked with purpose towards her fate.
Before following her in, Anders turned to Jeannie and winked. Coffee, he mouthed, and fished in his pocket and handed her a
twenty-dollar bill. “Get yourself something, too,” he added, now that Karen
was out of earshot. “Pick up some croissants or something, why don’t you?
Let’s treat ourselves.”
Jeannie smiled. “Let’s,” she said, and then, as though Anders himself had
conjured it, a moment from the night before flashed in her mind. The man,
his mouth on her ear, his hand tangled in her hair. I can’t get enough of you, he’d said. You’re so beautiful
. It didn’t repulse her to remember it though. Standing there with Anders,
the moment seemed raw and pure, almost romantic. She felt her body react,
ever so subtly, and she wondered if Anders could sense it, this change in
her.
***
For lunch they ordered sandwiches and ate in Anders’ office, Anders at his
desk and Jeannie on the floor, leaning against the wall. Anders was telling
Jeannie about blinking. That people blink, on average, seventeen times a
minute.
“So how’d you decide you wanted to be an eye doctor?” Jeannie asked.
“What I really wanted to be was a surgeon,” Anders said. “I wasn’t good
enough, though. Or these guys weren’t.” He held up one hand and flexed his
fingers. “They told me pretty early on that I didn’t have the right hands.
Not enough precision.”
“But they’re precise enough to stick in peoples’ eyes all day?”
Anders laughed. “Ophthalmology can get repetitive. I love my job, don’t get
me wrong. But there’s something exciting about surgery—the immediacy of it,
the stakes.”
“You want to be the hero,” Jeannie asked, but it came out sounding like she
was telling him. He looked at her sharply and she stuffed more sandwich in
her mouth.
“No, it’s not about being a hero.” He studied her. “What do you want to do,
Jeannie? After this, I mean.”
She swallowed and flashed Anders a smile she hoped seemed casual enough.
“What are you talking about, after this? I want to work here forever.”
Anders smiled but then raised an eyebrow at her. “No you don’t.”
“No, of course not,” she said. “I think after this I’ll run for president
or maybe become an astronaut.”
“You’re a bright girl, Jeannie,” Anders said. “You could do anything you
want.”
Jeannie shrugged, careful to keep her expression cool and unaffected. His
compliment was something she would slip away for later, like a present,
words to savor late at night when she was alone with her thoughts.
When Jeannie imagined what it would be like if Anders brought her home one
night, she spent more time on the build-up than the actual act. He’d ask if
he could treat her to a drink—that she’d been doing such a good job at the
office, it was the least he could do. She imagined the elevator ride up to
his apartment, the way they’d look at each other. Once inside, she’d walk
around, examining all his nice things, running a finger over the dining
table, along the bookshelves. She’d test out the couches and the chairs in
the living room, put her feet up on the ottoman. If he had a cat, she’d
swoop the thing up in her arms and kiss its little ears. He would follow
her through the rooms, watching her looking at his life and she’d make sure
nothing was left untouched or unnoticed. She’d make it so he wouldn’t be
able to sit in his own living room again without remembering her being
there.
***
When the last patient of the day left, Jeannie tidied her desk and waited
for Anders to appear. Anders was old, yes, and perhaps more problematic, he
was her boss, but it was precisely these things that made it appealing,
that made Jeannie want it. The sheer wrongness of the whole thing was like
a blanket they could slip under together. Once one rule was broken, who
says a second or a third or a fourth couldn’t be, too?
He came out, finally, no longer wearing his white coat. The look on his
face was tired but peaceful, and as Jeannie watched him walk towards her,
she sensed that he, also, was waiting for something to happen.
“Any nice plans this weekend, Jeannie?” He set his briefcase down on a
waiting room chair and leaned casually against the wall.
“Not really,” she said. “What about you?”
“Oh, not a thing. Looking forward to some nice R&R.”
Jeannie nodded. Something in her body shifted, became activated. “That
sounds nice.” She looked at Anders, didn’t allow herself to look away.
He smiled at her and for several moments silence hummed between them. Then
he nodded, as though answering a question in his own head, and reached for
his briefcase. “Well you have a good weekend, okay?”
Jeannie squirmed to the edge of her seat. Anders was pulling his coat out
of the closet and buttoning it up. She wondered then, if he wanted her to
follow him. “See you Monday,” he said, moving towards the door.
“Wait.”
He turned and looked at her.
“Do you want to get a drink or something?”
Anders’ brow furrowed. “Jeannie, you’re underage, aren’t you?”
“Oh. Well I’ll be twenty-one next month.” She tried to think of something
else to say. She didn’t know why he was making this difficult. “I have a
fake,” she said finally.
Anders smiled but he still looked concerned. “It’s a nice idea, Jeannie,
but I should get home. I’m beat. And I’m sure you’d have more fun with your
friends anyway.”
Jeannie’s eyes burned, and for one ridiculous moment she thought she might
cry. But the sensation passed quickly and then all she felt was the dread
of going home to an empty apartment, all those looming hours ahead. She
felt angry and desirous and bored, all at once. She wished her feelings
could somehow mesh together, cancel each other out, so she’d be left
feeling neutral. Though—feeling neutral was maybe worse.
“Is everything okay?” Anders asked.
Jeannie nodded. “Fine.” She smiled and bit her lip a little and willed her
eyes to sparkle, a final attempt. Foolish and clunky was how it felt, to
smile at him like that. “I’m fine,” she said.
“Okay. You take care.” He walked out then, leaving Jeannie alone in the
office with the empty waiting room chairs and the eerie, darkened exam room
down the hall with the strange medical machinery. She stood up and began
her clean-up routine. First the reception room, then the exam room, then
Anders’ office. She passed the eye chart without stopping to test herself.
The truth was she knew the letters by heart from having read them so many
times, so the test no longer really proved anything.
***
If Roger Ramsey was asked to describe what his daughter looked like, he
could have answered well enough. She had brown hair and brown eyes, both a
dark oaky color. A pale complexion, eyebrows light as shadows, a beauty
mark on her left earlobe like a piercing. Her neck was long and delicate,
practically translucent in a way that reminded Roger of a fish’s belly.
Jeannie’s curves, it seemed, had appeared overnight, transforming her into
somebody quiet and unknown, somebody who men noticed on the street. Jeannie
had a subtle but deliberate way of looking back at these men, filling Roger
with a panicked unease with which he had no idea what to do.
So it wasn’t that Roger couldn’t remember what his daughter looked like; it
was more that he didn’t have the ability to combine all of these features
in order to construct a whole. It was similar to the sensation of having a
word on the tip of your tongue. It was all there—the knowledge existed, but
not somewhere accessible. When Roger closed his eyes, he could conjure up
his wife’s face without thinking twice, the twitch of her mouth as she
watched TV, as though having a private conversation with the newscaster,
the way she stared at Roger blinkingly from across the room. He knew the
view from his spot behind the pharmacy counter by heart. The aisles of
painkillers and vitamins, the way the florescent lights reflected off the
speckled tiled floor. He could navigate the rows of white pharmaceutical
shelves with his eyes closed, could even see the face of Dave, the head
pharmacist, with his wide expressive mouth, bushy mustache to match, the
stony blue of his eyes, no problem. Jeannie, though, was harder to find.
It had been two months since Jeannie had moved out and the absence of his
daughter seemed louder and more pronounced than her presence had ever felt.
As a teenager, Jeannie had rarely been home. When she was, she spent most
of the time in her room, coming downstairs only occasionally to get food
from the refrigerator. In the few months of warm weather that their town
ever saw, Jeannie would stretch a bath towel out in the yard and read books
and play music through tinny portable speakers. If he or Ellen ever
approached her in the yard, she’d switch off the music and dog-ear the
page, then glance up with a pained expression. She disappeared at night,
and because he and his wife were both poor sleepers, they always heard the
creak of the front door when she left, and then again, in the early morning
hours when she returned.
The first time this happened, Ellen confronted Jeannie in her bedroom the
next morning, asked her where she had been. Roger was in the bathroom
brushing his teeth and he had turned off the faucet and opened the door a
crack so that he could listen. Jeannie told Ellen that she had a boyfriend,
a classmate named Todd. Ellen asked Jeannie how long she had been seeing
Todd and what it was they did together so late at night. Jeannie reported
that she’d been seeing Todd for several months now, and that mostly they
watched movies, but also—and then she had paused—they were having sex. Her
honesty had shocked Roger, and he could tell by Ellen’s response that she
was surprised, too. Ellen told Jeannie that she would make an appointment
for her to see a gynecologist about birth control, that it was important
that she be safe. Then she asked Jeannie if she’d like to invite Todd over
for dinner one night.
“That’d be nice,” Jeannie said.
“In the future, let us know if you’ll be out late,” Ellen added. “We worry
about you.” And Jeannie must have said okay because the conversation ended
shortly after.
Ellen never discussed this conversation with Roger, and while he considered
bringing it up with Jeannie, in the end he never did. It seemed as though
things were under control, and while it disturbed Roger to know that
Jeannie was having sex, he preferred not to think about it too directly. If
there was something Roger was supposed to be doing to protect his daughter,
he didn’t know what it was. He was not the kind of father who would know.
All he did know was that Jeannie had continued to go out at night, with or
without Ellen’s permission. Todd, however, had never showed up for dinner.
After that conversation, Roger found himself waking up frequently,
listening for Jeannie’s soft footsteps climbing the stairs, the gentle way
she closed the bathroom door behind her, the click of the lock, then the
stream of the shower. It had been like living with a ghost—but a familiar
ghost whose patterns were domestic and predictable. He couldn’t say why,
but those faint sounds of his daughter in the middle of the night conjured
up an awful ache in Roger.
Now that Jeannie wasn’t at home, her ghostliness was everywhere and nowhere
and Roger wondered what exactly he was missing. Roger knew that Ellen
sensed it, too, the feeling that something had been lost. He heard Ellen at
night. Her words were nonsensical and agitated, whispered pleas punctuated
by frantic breaths. “Watch over her,” she would say. And then, like someone
with a verbal tic, she’d chant, over and over: “Forgive me. Forgive me.
Forgive me.”
That first year after Matthew died, Ellen had also prayed. It was the
closest they ever got to talking about what had happened—Ellen praying in
Roger’s vicinity. They’d go to his grave and Ellen would speak—usually a
prayer but once in a while a poem, or sometimes just what the weather was
like that day.
It’s sunny but freezing. You can see your breath. People are
ice-skating. We miss you every second.
While Ellen spoke, Roger would keep one hand on her back. They both felt
uncomfortable standing so close to one another, but they had stayed that
way, touching, as though something bad might happen if they broke apart.
After Jeannie was born, they continued to go visit their son’s grave, but
separately. Roger would go on Matthew’s birthday in June and Ellen would go
six months later, in December, on the day he had died.
Roger turned on his side away from his wife and tried to fall asleep, but
of course, trying to fall asleep always meant it wasn’t going to happen
easily. Sleep had become something impossible and elusive for Roger, and
Ellen’s muttering made it that much more difficult. He thought about the
bottle of sleeping pills in the bathroom, but getting up would mean
acknowledging that he could hear her, and after so many nights of
pretending he hadn’t, he didn’t see the use of letting on now.
One day, Roger thought. One day, one of them would turn to the other and
say that it was over. It was inevitable now that Jeannie had moved out. But
he and Ellen had lived in a space of silence for so long that he no longer
thought it was their family that bound them together, like it had been when
they were younger. Now it was a matter of literally not knowing how to open
their mouths and speak. Not knowing how to get up and walk out. Walk to
where? What came next? Roger was counting backwards from one hundred in his
head when he felt something on his back. His wife’s hand. Before he could
stop himself he tensed up, and he could feel her fingers recoil, sensing
his discomfort.
“Are you asleep?”
Roger turned over. It was dark but he could make out the familiar outline
of her face.
“Do you think she’s okay?” she whispered.
“She’s fine,” Roger said. “Try to sleep.”
Ellen nodded and turned away from him.
Roger used the opportunity to get up and go to the bathroom. He poured two
of the little pills into his palm and swallowed them dry.
***
The next morning while Roger ate his cereal, he watched Ellen make lunch to
bring to school. When she squeezed the bottle of mustard onto her sandwich
and nothing came out, she shook it forcefully up and down. It made a rude
sound and a few beads of yellowed water landed on the bread.
“We need more mustard,” she said, turning to Roger.
Roger nodded. “I’ll stop after work. Anything else?”
Ellen pursed her lips and surveyed the kitchen, eyes wandering from the
cabinets above the stove to the refrigerator to the pantry. “Maybe
something for dinner.”
“I’ll get chicken.”
Ellen didn’t respond. Turning back to the kitchen counter, she wrapped the
sandwich in tinfoil and placed it in a paper bag.
Recently, Roger had started playing a game with himself. If Ellen toasts her bread, I’ll leave. If she doesn’t, I’ll stay.
Or
, If Ellen licks the mustard from her finger, I’ll leave. If she wipes
her hands with a napkin, I’ll stay.
It wasn’t that Roger was superstitious, really. It wasn’t that he was
waiting for the world to tell him what to do. But there was a kind of
comfort in believing that something as arbitrary as a piece of bread could
change his life. Not that he’d ever acted upon anything, or even come
close.
Ellen washed her hands and folded the top of the paper bag over, creasing
it meticulously with her thumb and forefinger. Ellen’s movements often
struck Roger as so painstakingly precise that he wondered if she, too, felt
that someone out there was making decisions for her, based on frivolous
things, like how tightly she tucked in a bed sheet, how thoroughly she
washed a dish. That day Ellen was wearing a blue dress and her hair was
tied into a neat bun at the base of her neck. He pictured her sitting at
her desk at school, watching the students as they filed in. “Good morning,
Mrs. Ramsey!” the nice ones would sing out. Little girls, he imagined,
eager to please. What did Ellen say back to them, he wondered. Did she
smile? Did she kneel down at their desks? When she read books aloud, did
she do the voices?
Ellen had to be at work earlier than he did, and usually he was upstairs
washing up when she left the house, but that day he lingered at the table
after he’d finished his breakfast. He pretended to be engrossed in the
newspaper as she put away the sandwich makings and wiped down the counter.If Ellen says goodbye to me, I’ll stay, Roger thought. If she goes silently, I’ll leave. He kept his eyes on the sports
section but listened as she rifled through her bag, making sure she had her
keys and her papers. Her footsteps moved from the kitchen to the front
hall. He heard the front door.
“See you tonight,” she called out.
Something collapsed in Roger’s chest and he put down the paper. “Bye,” he
called back. He waited until the door closed behind her and the car sounded
in the driveway before he stood up to go upstairs.
***
Her husband hadn’t come home after work and Ellen found herself alone in
the house, or at least as alone as it was possible for her to feel. There
were ghosts in their house, just as surely as there was a sink in the
kitchen, curtains in the windows. Roger could be a number of places.
Sometimes he went out with Dave and the other pharmacy staff on Fridays,
but she knew that he never really enjoyed those evenings, that he only ever
went to pass the time, to maintain the superficial friendships he had with
his colleagues as some sort of gesture. Or, Ellen thought, Roger could be
driving aimlessly through the spider webs of roads that surrounded their
small town. Eventually these roads led to other places. If he drove far
enough north, he’d reach Canada. If he drove south, eventually he’d hit New
York City, where Jeannie was.
Ellen fixed herself a salad for dinner. She rinsed the lettuce, cut a
tomato into slices, chopped up a cucumber. To her surprise, she found an
avocado, dark and perfectly ripe, like a gift on the counter. It occurred
to her that there might be a bottle of wine in the cupboard and when in
fact there was, she opened it and poured herself a glass. Roger drank
almost every night but Ellen rarely did. She couldn’t remember the last
time she and her husband had shared a bottle of wine. She ate her salad
slowly. She drank her wine and refilled the glass. It felt nice, to be a
little drunk.
As Ellen got ready for bed she noticed that Roger’s toothbrush and razor
and sleeping pills were missing from the bathroom counter. She checked
inside his closet and saw that most of his clothing was gone, too. It
occurred to her to feel sad or angry or frightened, but all she felt was a
mild sense of relief that Roger’s disappearance seemed to be deliberate;
planned. In a life where things happened—things over which Ellen had no
control—she’d long ago given up on the illusion of choice. Often it seemed
that Roger had given up, as well. As she climbed into bed alone though, she
wondered if maybe something had shifted. Maybe after all these years, Roger
was allowing for something new—something good—to open up.
***
In the middle of the night, Ellen woke with a start, one leg flailing out
spastically. She looked over and saw that her husband’s side of the bed was
still empty, covers pulled tight over the pillows. This time his absence
made her tremble. Ellen slipped out of bed and down the hall, turning on
lights as she went. Jeannie’s bedroom door was closed like it had always
been when she still lived there. Despite herself, Ellen knocked gently,
twice.
Inside, her daughter’s room was just how she’d left it, posters hung up on
the walls and ceiling. Musicians in dark clothing and dark eye makeup
staring out intensely in all directions. Barrettes and jewelry, dried out
tubes of lip gloss everywhere. There were hints of Jeannie’s childhood,
too—butterfly stickers made out in the shape of a J on the surface of her
desk, a few stuffed animals propped upright at the foot of the bed. A
photograph of Jeannie with Ellen and Roger was tucked into the frame of her
mirror. Jeannie, eight years old, dolled up for a dance recital, a bouquet
of roses in her arms. Roger and Ellen both had one hand on each of their
daughter’s shoulders. Ellen could see why Jeannie had chosen this photo to
display. All three of them were beaming.
Ellen began searching through stacks of books and old papers, under
Jeannie’s bed and through her desk drawers. She wasn’t sure what she was
looking for. A journal maybe, or more photographs, an old post-it note— Hi Mom, at the movies, be back later, xox J—which was how
Jeannie had always signed her notes, back when she’d bothered to write
them. Mostly though, it was old schoolwork that Ellen found, a few
postcards sent from friends who Ellen couldn’t place, song lyrics printed
out from the internet, margins filled with doodles. Under one stack of
notebooks, Ellen found a CD. In permanent marker somebody had written, “For
Jeannie. Listen to these songs and think of me.” The sort of lopsided,
misshapen hearts that only a lovesick boy could have drawn. Ellen had
graded enough schoolwork to know.
Ellen clicked the CD into Jeannie’s red and black boom box and pressed
play, leaned back against the wall. For several seconds the CD whirled
soundlessly in the box, but then when the first few chords of “When a Man
Loves a Woman” rang out into the room, it was enough to send chills up
Ellen’s arms and neck. Percy Sledge’s voice, warm and sweeping, like the
first breath of summer. It filled her up, thinking of somebody loving
Jeannie that much. She imagined a young boy listening to this song,
thinking of her daughter. She imagined Jeannie listening, a hint of a smile
threatening her daughter’s stoic expression. Ellen listened to the song all
the way though, and then a second time. She moved from the floor to
Jeannie’s bed, crawled beneath the covers and laid down. It saddened Ellen,
to think that Jeannie had left the CD behind.
***
Her father looked old and lost, standing there on Jeannie’s stoop. He was
wearing the same jacket he’d owned for decades, the gray one with the deep,
felt-lined pockets. When Jeannie had been young she used to stick her hands
in those pockets, pull out lint and crushed receipts and gum wrappers,
offer them up to her father in the palm of her hand. He would take the
little pieces of trash from Jeannie and gasp, feign surprise, as though she
was offering him gold. “Where did you find this?” he’d exclaim, then pocket
the crap again, for the next time.
She stepped outside and closed the door behind her. “What are you doing
here?”
Her father smiled something pinched and pained. “I needed to see you,” he
said. He reached out and pulled her into an urgent hug.
Jeannie felt her heart begin to thwack against her chest. “Is Mom okay?”
she asked, pulling back, imagining her mother in a litany of painful
scenarios: unconscious at the wheel of the car, pale in a hospital bed,
crying and unable to stop. There was a fragility to Jeannie’s mother that
wasn’t quite apparent in her expressions or the way she spoke. It was more
in the way she moved, as though at any moment, somebody might throw out a
leg and trip her.
“Mom is fine,” her father said. His hands dropped to his sides. “She misses
you. I just wanted to come see you, make sure you were getting along okay.”
Jeannie’s heart settled, began to beat more normally. She sat down on the
stoop, the cement of the stairs ice against her bare thighs. She was
wearing her pajamas, a pair of shorts and an old t-shirt. “I’m doing okay,”
she said. She swallowed, wondering if that was true.
“So this is where you live?” her father asked, sitting down beside her.
She nodded, glancing behind her at the brick apartment building, suddenly
proud of the solidity of the building, the fact that it was her home. “This
is where I live.”
“It’s nice,” he said, looking admiringly at the building. Then he turned
back to Jeannie. “I hope I’m not interrupting you. I should have called
first.”
“You’re not interrupting me,” she said, struck by the formality of his
apology. “It’s nice to see you,” she added, though this felt just as
formal, if not more so.
“Would you like to get a cup of coffee?”
The idea of sitting at a diner with her father drinking coffee struck
Jeannie as so painfully uncomplicated that she began to feel a little
breathless. She sucked in cool mouthfuls of air and watched the taillights
of a taxi stream down the block and disappear around a corner. “Okay,” she
nodded. She felt the urge to hug her father again, but she held back.
She considered asking her father up, but in the end, decided not to. Her
apartment still seemed something magical to her—she couldn’t quite believe
it was hers, and she worried that seeing him inside might diminish that
magic, make her feel young and girlish again. Inside she put on clothes
while her father waited in the foyer. She chose one of her favorite outfits
and played with her hair and face a little in the mirror. “I’m getting
coffee with my father,” she said into the mirror, to test out the
casualness of the words. “This is my father,” she tried. “Oh,” she said,
gesturing to the empty space next to her, as though some invisible stranger
was asking. “This is my dad.”
It had only been two months since she’d last seen her father, though it
felt now like a much longer time. He had been the one to drive her to the
bus station the day she left home, helped lug her suitcases, two bursting
duffel bags, from the trunk of the car into the underbelly of the bus. “Be
careful,” he’d said roughly, hugging her, and she’d realized that he was
trying not to cry. Handed her a bagged lunch for the bus ride and an
envelope with two hundred dollars inside. A post-it note:Don’t spend it all in one place, in her father’s scrawl. Love, Dad.
She pictured her father downstairs now, waiting for her. Hands in coat
pockets, rocking back on his heels. She wondered if he’d noticed the
mailboxes, the one all the way to the left with their name, Ramsey, printed
in little black letters. She figured that would be the kind of thing a
father would take pleasure in seeing. It made her smile, thinking of him
noticing it.
***
When Jeannie came back out, she was holding herself differently. When she
had opened the door the first time, his daughter had looked young, almost
childlike in her t-shirt and shorts, her hair pulled back into a plain
ponytail. She had been startled to see him standing there, disbelieving,
and it made Roger almost tearful to see. Now she was Jeannie again, cool
and reserved, wearing dark jeans and a denim jacket, a gray scarf wrapped
around her neck. Her shoes gave her an extra two inches so she was
practically his height. She had put on makeup and combed her hair a certain
way so it covered half her face. She was expecting him this time, so when
she appeared on the stoop, she regarded him with a look that lingered
between apprehension and politeness, the way you might nod hello to someone
you know but whose name you have forgotten.
“There’s a place right around the corner on Avenue C,” she said, and Roger
was surprised, though there was no reason to be, that his daughter knew
this city far better than he knew it. “Great,” he said, feeling impressed
and out of place at the same time.
They walked quietly beside one another, past lit-up storefronts and
tenement buildings with endless windows. It dizzied Roger, to think of
Jeannie living by herself amongst so many people. He tried to think of what
to say then, to his daughter, this self-possessed person who was leading
him through the maze of the city. “How’s your job at the eye doctor’s
going?” he asked.
“It’s good,” Jeannie said.
For several moments there was silence and Roger felt nervous, thinking
maybe this whole thing had been a bad idea. It had happened halfway through
the workday. The decision to leave, the impulse to go see Jeannie, an urge
so strong and unexpectedly parental, he’d felt no choice but to act on it.
He’d left work, barely offering an excuse, and driven home. He’d packed one
suitcase, and that had led to a second, then a third, until almost all of
his clothing were stuffed into bags. Then he’d loaded the car and driven
the five hours down to the city, stopping only once to use the bathroom. It
was at the rest stop when he’d thought to phone Ellen, though he had no
idea what he would’ve said to her. Ellen also could have called him, he
reasoned. And the fact that she hadn’t told Roger something.
“Do you know that all babies are born colorblind?” Jeannie asked abruptly.
“No,” Roger said. “I had no idea.”
Jeannie nodded. “Also, we blink on average seventeen times a minute.” She
glanced at Roger. “That’s more than six million times a year. We spend ten
percent of our waking hours with our eyes closed. Isn’t that crazy?”
Roger nodded, absorbing the facts, aware of the feeling of his eyes
fluttering open and shut. “That is crazy,” he said. “You know, when you
were born, your eyes were blue.”
“Really?” she said.
Roger nodded. “The bluest blue. Before we decided on a name for you, Mom
called you My Baby Blue.”
Jeannie smiled then, so happily, that Roger felt encouraged to keep
talking. “The nurses also,” he went on. “They couldn’t get over your eyes.
Even they started calling you that.”
Jeannie looked curiously at him. “I wish they hadn’t changed color,” she
said.
Roger opened his mouth to respond but Jeannie stopped mid-stride. “Here we
are,” she said and Roger followed her inside.
The diner one of those twenty-four hour places, with green plastic booths
and a counter upfront with mini boxes of cereal stacked like building
blocks, entire cakes in glass cases. Before he and Ellen had gotten
married, they used to drive into the city on weekends and eat at places
exactly like this. They’d split huge slices of cheesecake and plan their
future, talk about the life they wanted to build together. They had wanted
all of the same things. They had loved one another completely.
“Sit wherever you want,” a woman called from behind the counter, gesturing
towards the rows of empty tables.
Jeannie and Roger slid into a booth and flipped through the big plastic
menus that were folded into the napkin holder at the end of the table.
“I’m going to get toast,” Jeannie said. “Do you want anything to eat?”
Roger eyed the cakes up front. “If I get a slice of chocolate, would you
help me out?”
Jeannie smirked a little and rolled her eyes. Not in a cruel way, but in a
way that emphasized to Roger just how young his grown-up daughter still
was. “Sure,” she said.
When the waitress came to the take their order, Jeannie clapped the menu
shut. “Two coffees,” she said. “Wheat toast, please, with jam. And one
slice of the chocolate cake for my dad.” Her eyes flitted towards Roger and
she smiled.
The waitress nodded, jotting the order down on her pad. “Anything else?”
“That’s it,” Jeannie said. “Thank you.”
Roger swelled with pride. How easy she made it look, existing in the world.
Ordering toast and coffee and cake, like it was the most natural thing.
***
In the morning, Ellen woke up in a patch of light. Jeannie’s bedroom faced
east, and the sun that flooded through the window danced off the white of
the pillowcase, surged hot against the fan of her hair. She eased out of
bed and walked from room to room, checking for Roger. This was just a
precaution, though. She knew she was alone. For the first time in as long
as she could remember, Ellen felt relief, knowing the day would be entirely
her own.
The cemetery where Matthew was buried was a twenty-minute drive from their
house if she took the highway, but Ellen preferred the backroads, despite
the fact that it almost doubled the time. There was something crass about
the highway. The highway was what she took when she needed to go to the
mall or the DMV or the airport. On the backroads, the country stretched out
for miles on either side—in the winter, snow-covered and mute—and in the
summer, strewn with wildflowers and tall, whispering grasses. She had made
the drive so many times that she had started to feel that Matthew could
sense her approaching, even before she arrived.
Ellen parked where she always did, in a sandy lot, a five-minute walk from
her son’s grave. On the edge of the parking lot was a yellow cottage with a
restroom and a drinking fountain and a small sitting room. The first time
Ellen had been inside the cottage was the morning they’d buried Matthew.
That day had been bright and frigid, the sky a hard unrelenting blue. Ellen
had refused to fill the benzodiazepine prescription her doctor had written
for her, so Roger had taken it instead; filled it at his pharmacy and
attended the burial as a blurred, half version of himself. A version, Ellen
thought, that he’d never quite came back from.
Ellen hadn’t allowed herself to close her eyes or look away. When they
lowered the casket into the ground—the wooden casket, twenty-eight inches
long, fourteen inches wide, with the blue fleece lining inside, and her son
wrapped up in his baby blanket—she didn’t fall to her knees or call out.
She didn’t sink into anybody’s arms or cry onto anybody’s shoulder. She
didn’t fall apart the way Roger was doing beside her. That moment was not
about her. That moment had been about Matthew.
No, Ellen did not believe in a god. She didn’t believe in an afterlife or
angels or ghosts. But—if there was even one millionth of a chance that she
might be wrong—if there was a sliver of a possibility that in some
incomprehensible way, Matthew might be able to feel her there with
him—Ellen was not going to fail her child. She would try, with everything
she had, to be present.
It was only later in the privacy of the yellow cottage when Ellen had
collapsed, crumbling into herself, as though the floor might swallow her
up. She had been there dozens of times since that day, and fallen apart
dozens of times. She knew everything about that cottage. The blurry mirror
above the sink and the white tiling of the bathroom floor. The drinking
fountain with its porcelain basin, the water, its slightly metallic taste.
The dusty, lilac scent that seemed to live in the air.
Just like all her visits before, Ellen used the bathroom and fixed her hair
in the mirror before emerging back out into the day. On her walk to the
gravesite, she found a flat, oval-shaped stone, an even gray color. It was
warm from the sun, soft, almost malleable inside her palm. At the end of
her visit she would place it on Matthew’s grave with the others that she
and Roger had gathered over the years. Though the sight of her child’s
grave with all the collected stones would never bring Ellen peace, she had
grown attached to it after so much time.
Without her husband present, Ellen was able to speak freely to her son.
With Roger, she felt strange speaking out loud. She knew that he found it
peculiar and upsetting. She sat in the grassy patch next to Matthew’s grave
and spoke about Jeannie—the sister Matthew had never known. She told her
son that if he were alive, he would be almost twenty-four, and she wondered
aloud what he would have looked like, what he would have been like. She
thought how nice it would be, if Jeannie were to have an older brother with
her in the city.
Then Ellen was quiet. She understood that Roger wasn’t coming home. Grief
flooded her, and though the sensation was familiar, she was still surprised
by the sharpness of it, the way it left her breathless, as though someone
was pushing down hard on her chest. Carefully, she placed the stone on top
of three larger ones, and walked away.
In the car, Ellen turned on the radio. It was a song she knew; a sad one,
if you listened to the lyrics, though the melody was sweet, deceptively
cheerful. Ellen drove, singing, filling the car up with her voice. It was
different that day, driving home to an empty house. No Roger waiting in the
kitchen. No Jeannie in her bedroom. It startled her, how much she already
missed them.