Lullaby for the Rain Girl (20 page)

When we finished she dropped her head to my chest. I could feel tears on my skin.

“Don’t leave me, Ben,” she said. “Please don’t leave me.”

# # #

Yet for all of Sherry’s insecurities, and all of Rachel’s obliviousness, we got along, at least for a while. We became a kind of foursome, considerably more than just roommates: soon enough we combined the shopping and the cooking, both couples contributing roughly equally (though for their part, Peter did most of the work; Rachel never shopped, and rarely did anything more to prepare food than chopping a few carrots while smoking incessantly). We managed the limited bathroom facilities well enough, especially in the mornings, when it quickly became apparent that each couple should be allotted a certain amount of time there together rather than apart, for efficiency’s sake.

Peter and I hung out together sometimes, drinking beer and talking about this and that. Even Sherry and Rachel went downtown together a couple of times, though those efforts didn’t last long on Sherry’s part. (“Does she have to be rude to
everybody?”
I remember Sherry asking me.) On nights that Peter and Rachel weren’t gone to rehearsals, and I wasn’t totally buried in schoolwork (and my burden had lifted a bit: the financial easing had allowed me to quit the cafeteria job at school), we sometimes just lazed around the apartment together, playing music, watching videos on a new cable channel called MTV—Peter had set up his television in the main room, along with a shiny new top-loading VCR. In this era video rental stores didn’t yet exist, but the Wherehouse record stores rented a few movies on tape, along with Fotomat. Two of us would be deputized to head down to some such place and pick up a couple of movies while the other two stayed and waited for our pizza to be delivered.

It was fun, really, and quite different from anything Sherry or I had expected. The difference came entirely from Peter—naturally gregarious, affable, and likeable, he was our team leader, our guiding spirit. He had a quality I later realized was admirable, and rare: he accepted people as they were, and was truly interested in them. “So tell me about your writing,” he might say to me, and what he was looking for was no two-sentence summary answer: he really wanted to
know.
He asked to read some, and I gave him two or three of my best stories; he returned them a day or two later with annotations covering them, all quite helpful and insightful, and we talked about my work for an hour or more. He was a wonderful audience, more directly and supportively critical than Sherry, who generally deferred to me and said it was all great.

He spent time with Sherry, too, and with the two of us together. Once in the living room Sherry said, “You guys are so
directed.
Ben’s got his writing. Peter, you’ve got your CPA stuff. Even Rachel’s got her singing. But I just don’t have—a
direction,
you know?”

“Well,” Peter said, “what do you
want
to do?”

“That’s just it,” she said glumly. “I don’t know. I like books. I like music. But I’m not talented. I can’t
do
those things. I just feel like—like I’m going to be stuck forever as a clerk somewhere.”

“Oh, don’t be silly. You’ll figure things out. You’ll choose a major and that will give you some direction.”

“Even that’s hard,” she said. “What do I major in? English? I don’t want to be an English teacher, but what else do you do with that degree? Business? I’m not like you, Peter. I don’t have a head for things like that.” She leaned against me on the sofa, and uncharacteristically took my cigarette from my hands, puffing on it quickly and then placing it back between my fingers. “You guys are
together.
I’m not.”

“I’m not as together as you think,” Peter said. He was certainly correct about that, though just
how
correct I wouldn’t know for some time yet.

“Still. You’ve got a sense of direction.
I’m just—wandering in the fog.”

“Why don’t you just live?” Peter said, leaning forward and looking at her intently. “I mean, who says you have to ‘do’ anything? You like that bookstore where you work, don’t you? You said you do.”

“I do,” she admitted, playing with her hair. “But it’s not like I want to be a clerk in a bookstore my whole life.”

“Who said your whole life?” Peter said urgently. “Why do people always think like that? Just because you’re doing it now doesn’t mean you’ll do it your whole life. You’re in college. You’re doing well. Things will fall into place for you.”

She smiled at him. “You make it sound like they will.”

He leaned back again. “You’re too smart to fail,” he said. “Just give yourself time. Jesus, what are you, nineteen, right? You’re a baby still.”

She chuckled. “And
you’re
all of twenty-two.”

“Hey,” he laughed, “at least I can buy beer.”

“That’s true,” I said, “and God knows we’re grateful for it.”

“Just another reflection of my Texas charm. So should we go get a movie for tonight?”

“You go,” I said to Sherry. “I want to try to write for a little while beforehand.”

“You’ll order the Chinese food, though,” Peter said, “right?”

They left together, Peter and Sherry, leaving me alone to call out for the food. After I’d made the call I laid out on the sofa for a few minutes, yellow pad in hand, trying to move a story forward; but it seemed hopelessly stuck. I tried not to think about the fact that my latest opus had come back in the mail today with a rejection slip paper-clipped to it. I’d lost count of the rejections by now—at least twenty or thirty, I supposed. Occasionally an editor would scribble something encouraging on the bottom of one of these slips, but for the most part they were just impersonal rectangles of doom. It was damned depressing.

The doorknob rattled once, then again. There was silence for a moment, then another rattle. Finally, as I knew it would, the doorbell rang. Rachel habitually forgot her keys, as she forgot so many other things. I stood and went to the door.

“Thanks,” she mumbled, brushing past me. “Peter here?”

“He went with Sherry to get a video. I’ve ordered Chinese.”

She looked up at me. Her eyes were tinged red. Exhaustion? Drugs? I didn’t know. “Okay.”

I went back to my yellow pad, but knew I would accomplish nothing with her nearby. I wasn’t very comfortable around Rachel Blackburn—no more than Sherry was, really. But I’d rarely been alone with her, since she was virtually always with Peter. I heard her shuffling around in their bedroom for several minutes. Then she came back out, wearing a different old black T-shirt than before. She made her way to the refrigerator, pulled out a beer, dropped into the armchair beside me.

“How are you?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Cops haven’t caught up with me yet.”

I smiled slightly. We sat in silence for a few minutes.

Finally she said, “What are you writing?”

“A story.”

“Any of them get published yet?”

“No.”

“That sucks,” she said, swallowing beer. She brought out her cigarettes then. “Want one?”

“Sure.” We lit up. She smoked Camels, just like me. We sat there puffing. “How about you? Your writing, I mean. Still writing songs?”

She looked at me. “You know what? I’m kind of losing interest in writing songs, to be honest.”

“Really?”

“I dunno. It was Peter’s idea. The whole band thing. It’s all right. But there’s not that much you can do in a song. I mean, lyrically. I like writing poems better.”

“You write poems? I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah, that’s because you think I’m just some stupid punky girl. I read books too, you know.”

“Rachel, I never said—”

“Well, I
do.”

“Okay.”

“I read about dark stuff. But not, like, stupid shit. I don’t read about witchcraft or the Bermuda Triangle or shit like that.” She ran her hand through her hair which was, as always, greasy and every which way. I wondered why she didn’t take better care of herself. “I read about, like, the American Indians.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
I read that. That was some fucked-up shit. And what we did in Vietnam. I’ve read about that, too. I read a book about the My Lai thing.”

“Wow.” I was genuinely impressed.

“The Holocaust. I read a lot about that. I read a history of Auschwitz. I read
Night.
Hardcore shit.”

“Do you ever read anything—well, lighter?”

She shook her head. “I don’t read much lately,” she said. “With the band and all. I don’t have time.”

“You write poems, though? Real poems, I mean? Not song lyrics?”

“I write real poems,” she said. “All the time.”

“I’d like to see some.”

She eyed me suspiciously. “Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“You might think they’re shit.”

“I’m sure I won’t.” Actually I wasn’t so sure; but I was curious about this new aspect of my sullen roommate’s personality. I figured they would be teenage girl stuff, heavy on the angst, lots of why-does-nobody-understand-me. But I could make some encouraging remarks, I figured, and maybe our both being writers—or “writers”?—could forge some sort of connection between us.

On the milk crate that we used as a coffee table was a black spiral-bound notebook of Rachel’s where she kept her handwritten song lyrics. It was covered with stickers that had the names of punk bands on them—
Black Flag, DOA, Minutemen—
and different-colored papers stuck out of it haphazardly, at odd angles.
She took up the notebook and flipped through some of its contents. She brought out two sheets of paper, both with her wildly scrawled writing on them, and seemed to consider which to give to me. Finally she held one out.

“Here,” she said. “Read this one. I think it’s pretty good.”

The penmanship and smudges and crossings-out made it a little hard to decipher, but I was able to make it out well enough. This is what I read:

“Shadows”

by Rachel Lynn Blackburn

Last night I dreamed of Anne Frank

again. She stood in a white dress

at the end of a tunnel black

like a sewer.
Are you there?

she called in perfect,

faintly British English,

her voice reverberating back

onto itself.
I do hope

you’re there, because I’m alone

here and I’m very hungry.

I watched her scrape black fog

from the cylindrical wall

and put it in her mouth, saying,

You see, I eat shadows here.

I checked my pockets, finding

only handfuls of shadow. They spilled

from my coat, washed down

the tunnel, ran over her bare feet.

Oh no,
she cried,
I was so hoping

you’d brought something else….

And then I was not there.

She ran toward where I

had been, calling,
Hello, did you bring

chocolate? I love chocolate! And fruit,

and almonds.
She stopped then,

looked around. Fell silent.

After a while, her fingers

reached to scrape

me mechanically from the wall.

And, without expression, she

placed me slowly

into her mouth.

“You
wrote
this?” I said stupidly, looking up at her.

“Yeah?” she said, suspicion edging her voice.

“I...” I didn’t know what to say. I was flabbergasted. “Rachel, this—this is excellent. This is—wow. Really.” Poetry wasn’t my field, but I’d read
The
Paris Review
and
The American Poetry Review
at the library and grown to love the work of people like Gary Snyder, Adrienne Rich, C.K. Williams. I was no expert, but I felt informed enough to know that this poem of hers had genuine quality.

For the first time, I saw the traces of a smile cross her lips. “You mean it? You’re not bullshitting me? You can tell me if it’s crap.”

“I’m—it’s not crap, Rachel. It’s definitely not crap. It’s—powerful. Anne Frank in—purgatory. It’s like you want to save her, or help her, but you can’t.”

“That’s it. That was the idea.”

“But at the end—it’s almost like—it’s almost sort of sexual, isn’t it?”

“Sort of. Mostly it’s just that I can’t give her any more than she already has. Just...”

“Shadows.”

“Shadows.”

I had the experience of suddenly seeing someone I thought I knew—knew slightly, at least—in an entirely different light. I also felt a twinge of simple, old-fashioned envy. Jesus Christ, she was
good—
better, I knew, than I was. I had no chance, not then at least, of writing anything with such direct, visceral power.