Roses and Rot (10 page)

And was gone. No one in front of me, and only the same shiny foil door. Again. I shook my head, pinched the bridge of my nose, hard. Home. Sleep. Coffee. All of these things would make it better, and make me brave enough to send Beth my pages, and to pretend that her response didn’t matter.

Having decided that, my head cleared, and I found my way out of the maze of studios. Past the empty tables of There, and through the open Commons, dodging a game of what looked like musical tag—the players switching instruments when tagged, making a glorious cacophony. I waved away the offer of a spare trumpet, if I wanted to play, and made it home.

“Something weird happened while I was in my studio today.” Marin’s hair was still damp from her shower, and the heavy scent of her lilac lotion mixed with the menthol and eucalyptus from the oil she had slathered on her strained muscles. The combination should have been off-putting, but I found it strangely comforting instead. It smelled normal, companionable.

“Weird like how?” I asked.

“Like surreal, almost.” She sat on the floor and folded herself into a stretch.

I turned away from my desk, from the night shining through the window. “Well, that sounds exciting. Tell me.”

“I like to keep the windows uncovered in the studio when I’m working. When else am I going to get to dance in the middle of a forest, right? So I had them open tonight.”

I didn’t tell her that I already knew that she danced with the
windows uncovered, that I had seen her, seen Gavin, through them. That moment was theirs.

“It’s been long enough that most of what’s outside of them is background noise. Like, I noticed the fox that went wandering by last week, but I don’t jump every time a rabbit hops past, or the turkeys come to hang out, at least not anymore. Have you seen the turkeys? They’re enormous.”

“I saw them when I was running the other day. And detoured around them because, yes, enormous.”

“Anyway, tonight, I kept catching movement in my peripheral vision. So I stop, and it’s birds. A whole flock of them. Flocking back and forth, in unison, just outside my windows.”

“That sounds beautiful,” I said.

“It was, sort of. But also weird, because when I stopped to figure out what was going on, they took off into the trees. Then when I started dancing again, they came back.”

“They wanted to dance with you.” I laughed as I said it.

“I know it sounds crazy, Imogen, but that’s kind of what it felt like.” She shifted the pose again, walking her hands out in front of her.

“What did Gavin think?”

“He wasn’t there. I work on my own at least once a week. I figure if I’ve come out here to get away from a company and the influence of other dancers, that I ought to take that part seriously.” She bent herself flat to the floor, held the stretch.

“It’s working better than I thought it would,” she said. “There’s this peace, clarity, to being in the studio by myself. I don’t have to worry about the girl next to me having better extension or sharper turns. Like I’m figuring out how I see me as a dancer, instead of how everyone else does.”

Confidence rang through her words. “That sounds great. And you’re still happy you’re working with Gavin?”

She sat up. “Is that a nosy big sister question, or a how’s your art question?”

“Yes,” I said.

“He’s the best partner I’ve ever worked with. I can tell I’m dancing better, even when he’s not there, because of what I’ve learned from him. Which is great. It’s one of the things I was hoping for.

“I like being with him outside of the studio, too. He talks to me like I matter. We have fun.” She smiled.

“I’m glad,” I said.

“How’s the writing going?” She sat up, leaned against the side of the bed.

“Good. I feel like I’ve got things figured out, at least for now.” I had sent Beth the pages she wanted, and then obsessively checked my email until she responded. She’d said she was happy with their quality, that it seemed like I was truly pushing on the possibilities of the structure I had chosen, which had been enough praise to make me do a victory dance around my room. She had also given me a detailed list of things to think about to make them better, and that had been good, too. You don’t tell someone how to get better if you don’t think they can. “I may steal your audience of birds for it.”

“If you’re collecting weird stuff, you should talk to Ariel, too. Her studio was full of leaves the other day.”

“Leaves?” It was so odd, I wasn’t sure I had heard right.

“Everywhere. All over the floor. Even on her piano. It was a real mess. She had to call and have someone clean it out.”

“I didn’t realize we had wind bad enough to do that. Maybe I’ve been spending too much time up here.” I hadn’t asked for studio space, so it was easy to lose track of the world outside of my story
and my room. Sometimes there were days that I didn’t make it out of the house.

“That’s where the weird comes in,” Marin said, the undertone of excitement in her voice reminding me that she had devoured horror stories and unsolved mysteries growing up, the weirder the better. She always wanted to hear the scary parts.

“Ariel hates people overhearing her when she’s writing songs, so her studio is one of the soundproof ones.”

“Which means no windows,” I said.

“Which means no windows. Which means that someone had to bring the leaves in there. So crazy, right?”

“Really crazy,” I agreed. “But maybe good for a story.”

Later that night, I looked up from my work, out of the window. The trees were full of birds, flocked velvet patches against the canvas of the sky. Maybe they watched, maybe they slept, tucked in convenient perches. Every time I looked up from my writing, they were there.

So I did what I had joked about. I stole the birds for a story, of a night that came in on feathers and covered everything around it, houses and rivers and trees. That perched, watching. Of a girl who grew wings to fly over and out of it, flying above those other wings, that feathered night, and all the watching eyes beneath.

Then I finished. Put my notebook away, saved files on the computer. Stood up from my chair and stretched, looking out once more to where the birds rested.

As one, they lifted from the trees, moving shadows that blended into the rest of the night’s secrets.

Wood smoke curled in through my open window, rich, like burning leaves. I pushed the covers back, rubbed sleep from my eyes. The scent grew stronger. Curious, I looked out.

There was a fire in front of our house, and Helena was tossing things on it.

My right hand curved itself into a claw, and I felt the flames, felt the sick-sharp heat of them, the hunger that would turn even my bones to ash. Everything went black around the edges, and I swayed forward, catching myself on my desk. The crackle of the flames got louder, and I ran outside.

“Helena! What are you doing?” I stopped on the edge of the fire, close enough to grab her if I had to, far enough to feel almost safe.

She was soot-stained and covered in rage. “I’m not good enough. This fellowship was supposed to make me better, but the only thing I’ve learned is how inadequate I am. I quit. I’m done.” She tossed another notebook, and watched, eyes hard, as the cover began to bubble and curl.

“Helena, I—” My stomach clenched, and my head was full of burning words. Sweat beaded up on my forehead. I was shaking. The words, the pages. My hand.

I bit the inside of my mouth until I tasted blood. I wasn’t there. I was here.

I was here.

“Fine,” I said. “Fine. You’re right. I don’t even need to have read your work to know that it’s clearly the most facile, saccharine excuse for poetry ever written. It’s not even good enough for greeting cards.”

She stared at me, the final notebook loose in her hand. “You bitch.”

“Pick one or the other, Helena. Either your work sucks and deserves to be burnt, or I’m a bitch who doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Which is it?”

She stepped back from the fire and clutched the notebook tighter in her hand. “I’m not good enough.”

“Maybe you’re not. That doesn’t mean you should light your work on fire. On our lawn. Seriously, what the fuck?”

“You don’t know what it’s like.”

“Don’t know what what’s like, Helena?”

The fire had mostly died down. Scraps of paper scattered across the lawn. My hand uncurled, no longer felt like it was burning, too.

When Helena next spoke, her voice was harsh and raw. “What if this is all I have? If I never get any better than I am, then I’m not good enough. I’m adequate. Competent. But not good. Not fucking good enough. And don’t try to tell me there isn’t a difference.”

There was nothing I could say to that. She was right. There was a difference between competent and good. Talent wasn’t the only thing you needed to succeed, but it was still needed. And the cruelest thing was, regular crises of ego aside, if you were competent, you could see the difference in your work. You knew how it stacked up, could measure the gaps between fine and good, and good and great. Not having enough talent seemed almost worse than not having any, because having a little meant having just enough to know what you lacked. I stood with her in silence, watching the flames burn to embers, then to ash. Watching her face, hard and lost.

When the last of the ashes had burned away, Helena walked up the stairs and back into the house, the one remaining notebook still in her hand.

It was impossible to settle back into my own work after that. Every time I opened my notebook I was sure I smelled smoke, even after closing the window. Even after going back downstairs, and filling the soup pot with water, and dumping it on the ashes.

The arts have their own version of the “your mom” joke. That you need more fans than just your mom. That just because your mom liked it, or put it on her refrigerator, or thinks you should be cast as Hamlet after seeing you as the second shepherd in the Christmas play, that it doesn’t matter. That and three bucks will get you a ride on the subway.

The punchline is that of course your mom is your biggest fan. Everyone understands that. It’s natural. The weird thing would be if she wasn’t.

When my work got burned—when years of stories, everything I had written to that point, was thrown on the flames—it was my mother who threw them there. Who held my hand in the fire, burning me with them.

The most dangerous thing you could do in a fairy tale was to be a girl with a mother. Because that meant your mother would die, and that death would only be the beginning of things going very, very wrong. Your father would acquire a new wife, who would arrive with daughters of her own, and she would scheme to send you into a life of drudgery, or cast you out into the forest alone. Or, worse still, there would be no new mother, and your father would fall in love with you, forcing you to leave home and run far, far away to escape.

I couldn’t imagine it, growing up. How a stepmother could be worse than my real mother, than this woman who was supposed to love me, and who so clearly did not. I envied the girls in the fairy tales, sent by stepmothers to sleep in the ashes, or in the barn with the beasts. The girls who ran.

Smart girls, brave girls. Girls who escaped. Girls who saw what they wanted their fate to be, and clawed for it. I couldn’t imagine being that brave, not with a mother in the house. I made myself small and quiet, not even a whisper in a corner, and still she saw me. I kept all the secrets that she wielded like threats, that she stopped my mouth with, and still, I was not small and quiet enough. I think the only way I could have been small and quiet enough would have been to disappear completely.