Elegies for the Brokenhearted (13 page)

What's that you reading?
you asked at first. Then, after it became clear that the book was all I could read and all I thought about, that the book had become everything to me, you said:
You still reading that
Heart of Darkness?
What the hell's wrong with you?
At some point while I was out you must have picked up the book and read it, because you started offering advice.
If I was you,
you said,
which I thank God I'm not, I'd have a thing or two to say about that Kurtz character and his obvious homosexuality.
I stayed up late into the night, every night. Every so often you'd rouse from sleep and tell me,
Mister Kurtz, put him down. He dead.

Finally I turned in a forty-three-page paper and got a D. On the bottom of the final page my professor—a bitter German obsessed with Kafka—had written, in block letters that stood in stark contrast to the paper's looping, fuzzy logic: G
ET A GRIP
.

 

B
y then spring was in full bloom. In the quadrangle beneath our window people threw Frisbees, rode bicycles, played football, and their lively cries rose up to our room. There was a general sense of happiness and excitement in the air, but for us everything seemed to be taking a grim turn, lapsing into a minor key. One of the janitors we always talked with in the cafeteria—an ancient and painfully thin man named Leroy, who had trembling yellow eyeballs—developed a wet, pesky cough, and for a few days he could hardly get through a conversation. He was always taking a handkerchief from his chest pocket and spitting into it, great globs of bloody phlegm, and you kept telling him to see a doctor. “Ain't got time for no doctor,” he'd say. Then he went missing for a week and when we asked after him we were told he had checked into the hospital and died the next day.

The news of Leroy's death plagued you.
I told him,
you kept saying, angry.
Didn't I tell him see a doctor? Goddamn,
you said. It was as if Leroy's death and your failure were bound up together, you saw these things in the same light, his struggles—I keep on keeping on!—and your failures, they were mutual. After the news of Leroy's death you fell into a foul mood you never recovered from. You started to complain in a general way about white people. Under your breath, in an almost constant stream, you listed their flaws.
Look at them eating their yogurt,
you said,
drinking their little bottles of water, wearing their shorts, their loafers, their hand-knit Irish sweaters, riding their little bicycles to the library, sitting all quiet in class taking notes, balancing they checkbooks, it bores me to tears just watching them, I'd rather die,
you said,
than be a white person.

Sometimes you took care to excuse me from these faults on the grounds that I was pathetic. But other times you turned even on me. I'd be reading and you'd mutter,
Pretty little white girl think she got problems. I'll tell you about some problems
. And I'd say, “I can hear you, you know.” And you'd say,
Good for you
. We started to quibble like siblings elbowing each other in the backseat of the car. You complained that the sound of my pencil scratching on paper was interrupting your enjoyment of your favorite shows, I complained about how loud you kept the television. You started turning up the television even louder, I started bringing home plain glazed donuts instead of chocolate. I let my alarm go off for longer stretches each morning before hitting the snooze button, you picked my clothes off the floor and set them in a pile on my bed, told me to stop being such a disgusting slob; on the same pretense you washed my Donut Land uniform in the bathroom sink and hung it to dry in a shower stall.
You should've seen the water,
you said,
all thick and gray, three times I washed it and the water was so murky it could hardly get itself down the drain, you pig.

Which was the last straw.

I started staying out later and later at the library. When I came home we fought like jealous lovers.
Where you been? You must've been at the library again 'cause I
know
you ain't been out with friends. You don't have a friend in the whole goddamn world 'sides me. Your own
family
don't even like you. When's the last time anyone call you, or mail you something?

“At least,” I said, “I'm not getting letters from James Findley Ramsey the Third.”

At least,
you said,
people care what happening with me. Nobody even notice you. Nobody care what you do or fail to do, you ever notice?

“What's your fucking problem?”

I'm not the one with the problem. You the one with problems. Nobody like you at all. Thin Mint don't even like you and Thin Mint like everybody.

“At least,” I said, “I get out of bed in the morning.”

Good for you,
you said.
Just a minute while I call up the president and tell him about it. Hello, Georgie?
you said, thumb in your ear, pinkie extended toward your mouth.
Hey, George, it's me again, what's happening? I'm just calling to tell you my roommate, Mary Murphy? Look like a walking corpse? Uh-huh, that's the one. I'm just calling to tell you she get out of bed this morning. Uh-huh. What's that? You gonna give her the Medal of Honor? Oh, George, you too much.

“Fuck you,” I said.

To which you of course responded:
You wish.

“Why don't you go hang out with the other girls, then,” I said, meaning the heiresses all up and down our hall, blond and blue-eyed and rich, one indistinguishable from the next, their closets so overflowing with clothes, with silks and velvets, with tweeds and cashmere, that many of them had been obliged during the first week of school to go out and purchase additional bureaus. By which I meant the girls you had spent the entire year making fun of, referring to as
Blondie
and
Barbie
and
Baby
and
Bitchface.

And so you did. You dropped me in the coldest way you could think of—by making yourself popular. When I came home from the library one night you were sitting in the lounge with a circle of girls gathered around you. You were telling their fortunes—reading their palms—and had dressed the part, your head wrapped in a red turban, gold hoops dangling from your ears. You sat running the sharp edge of your fingernail along the girls' lifelines, money lines, love lines. On successive evenings crowds of lovesick girls lined up to see you, standing in line in their satin Doris Day pajamas, their faces covered in mud masks, their hair in curlers, wanting to know—they held out their palms to you, desperate and helpless—whether they were loved by certain boys, boys with names like Preston Carrington and Wesley Knoxville. One of the girls, the loudest and blondest of all, was named Lacy Winterson, and she was in love with a boy named—in all official, Confederate seriousness—Rhett Butler. “Does Rhett Butler,” said Lacy, “love me? Is he the one?”

Let's see,
you said.
Sit down.
You took her hand in yours, peered at it, lifted an eyebrow.

“What!” said Lacy. “What's it say?”

Quiet,
you told her.
This one special. I need to concentrate on this one.
You tortured her, studied her palm for five whole minutes without saying anything, pulling at her skin, bunching it together and then stretching it out, bending her fingers back.
Well,
you said, finally,
that's what I was afraid of. I don't see any way out of it.

“What?” said Lacy.

You gonna get married all right,
you said.
And you gonna be happy for a while
. You stopped, got up and crossed the room, picked up and flipped through a magazine while Lacy sat on the edge of the couch, her mouth hanging open.

“Then what?” she said in the softest voice.

Well,
you said,
I can't say for sure. But after a certain point you ain't gonna be happy no more.
Though this was the vaguest possible fortune, and bound to come true for more or less everyone on earth, Lacy felt doomed in a very particular way, as though she alone had been singled out to suffer a rare disease. Her eyes brimmed with tears and she shut herself away in her room.

You were wildly popular. “Carson,” the girls told you, “we had no idea you were so awesome!” They invited you to the private pizza parties they held in their rooms. Each night these girls had pizza delivered to the dorm by other students who didn't have money, and so worked as delivery drivers, students who suffered the indignity of wearing uniforms equally as bad as Donut Land's, and you sat on the other side of this divide quite regally. You sat in those rooms telling all kinds of stories. I could hear you talking and the girls erupting in laughter. They liked to call you “girlfriend.” “Hey, girlfriend,” they said. You made a habit of exclaiming, in a voice so loud it was sure to carry into our room:
It sure is nice to have some fun for a change!

One night you sat in the lobby in your gypsy wear but didn't have any takers—the thrill was gone and everyone was studying for finals, which you didn't have to worry about because you had already failed. You returned to the room and took your suitcases out from your closet, started taking clothes off their hangers, went fussing about the room. You took the pictures down from the wall, picked the little circles of tape off their backs. When you were finished packing you sat on your bed and sighed. This was my cue to say something like, “You're leaving already? You're not staying through finals?” But I didn't. I had one talent in life and it was staying silent through a grudge. In all my years fighting with my sister and mother I had never once broken first.

There was a
Creature Double Feature
running on the local channel, some black-and-white horror film involving the destruction of a city by a giant reptile. The music soared in what was supposed to be suspense, but the effects were laughable.
Pitiful,
you said. It was a long time before you spoke again, and when you did it was with annoyance.
Gimme your hand,
you said.

“Why?”

To read your fortune, dummy
.

It had never crossed my mind that you could actually read a palm—I'd assumed that you only claimed to read palms as a means of telling people what you really thought of them, as a means of dooming them toward unpleasant futures, out of spite. But I let you anyway.

Average,
you said.
Nothing too exciting
. Then you examined my other hand, turned it this way and that in the light of the television.

This here's not too common,
you said, tracing a line that slanted across my palm, left to right.
Not too common at all. Fact I never seen this here in real life, just in books, never up close in person.
An extra line, you claimed. Strange. Like a sixth finger.

“What's it mean?” I said.

It could mean one of two things. People think different ways about it.

“What do they think?” I wanted to know but you were coy.
I don't think anybody really know what that line mean. It's too uncommon for anybody to say for sure what it mean.

“What's it mean?” I said. “I'm gonna die any minute, right? It's okay. You can tell me. I don't believe in this stuff.”

No,
you said.
Not that.

“Then what?”

I tell you what I think it means,
you said.
My personal opinion. And I already thought this anyways from the minute I saw you. What I think it means is you gonna be famous.

“For what?” I said.

Can't say,
you told me.
You don't have any special talents far as I can see.

We watched as a giant lizard reared up on its hind legs and bit the spire from the Empire State Building.
Maybe,
you said,
you'll be one of those people who breaks a record. For the longest fingernails or something. Maybe you'll live to a hundred and fifty.

“What's the other thing?” I said. “You said it could mean two things.”

I forget,
you said. Then you got up and snapped off the television. That was the thing about you. You talked and talked and talked, but as soon as someone wanted you to talk, you clammed up and turned your back.

We lay in the dark, quiet, for a long time. I was turning a question over in my mind but didn't know how to put it into words. I kept trying to think of what to say, and failing, until finally I had the feeling that if I didn't hurry you'd fall asleep and I wouldn't get to ask you, and so I burst out with it: Why? Why, why, why? Why were you going back to that place? Why had you thrown it all away? For what possible reason? I wanted you to give me one good reason why.

It was a long moment before you answered me, and when you did it was more than I'd bargained for.
I'm gonna tell you something,
you said,
and if you ever tell anyone else I'll kill you. Even after I'm done telling you I don't wanna hear a word out of you, I don't wanna hear a single peep. You just keep lying there quiet like always. Not a word. You say a single word and I'll kill you
. And then you told me why. You told me how Sharon, your sister, had given birth years ago to a baby but had lost it in labor, and after that couldn't have any more children, though a child was what she had always wanted most in life. So when you'd gotten pregnant in your junior year there was at first talk in the house of adoption, of sending you off to some home and telling everyone you'd gone away on scholarship to some fancy summer school, but the more you talked about this with your mother and Sharon the worse it seemed, with Sharon not being able to bear children and all, and here you were with one you didn't want, here you were with college and a bright future ahead of you ruined, it started to seem like a good idea to give your baby to Sharon. It seemed reasonable to keep you both in the house claiming illness, mononucleosis, reasonable to tell everyone, after you had the baby at home, that it was Sharon's.
The point is,
you said, as if I hadn't already figured out the truth, as if I weren't already aching with it,
the reason why I'm going home, the reason I can't stand it here, Regis belong to me
.