The Night Gwen Stacy Died (14 page)

Peter had taken a job in a family restaurant, washing dishes. He was getting paid
under the table, and often returned with a small roll of bills to sort. His arms were
always pink when he came home, from all that hot water. The hairs on his arm were
matted in every direction.

“You look like a haystack,” Sheila said to him, petting his arm.

“So do you,” said Peter. He didn’t take his eyes off hers, as if there were a whole
mess of hay in her eyes, a maze or something.

There was a balding preacher on a post at the street corner near her home in Iowa
who would yell at passersby on Saturday mornings about hay and eyes. “It’s easier
to pass through the eye of a needle, than to find a needle in a haystack.” Or, “Look
how you see a fleck of dust in your neighbor’s eye but not a haystack in your own.”
Or something like that.

Sheila looked from Peter’s eyes to his arm and back again.

“Parker, you’re insane,” she said. She smiled and drew her hands around his neck,
pulled him into her. “I’m sorry to say, you don’t make a bit of sense.”

“Of course it makes sense. It means we’re the same,” Peter said. He walked her toward
the window that looked over the park. “We’re good together.”

She leaned into him, offered him all her weight. Peter kissed her on the mouth. He
started to pull off her clothes. Sometimes they would go to the bed right away, but
sometimes he wouldn’t let her touch him. He would remove her clothes slowly and stare
and say things under his breath like, “Oh,” and “Oh, God.”

Other times, she would enter the apartment and find Peter staring off into space with
this blank look on his face, and when she approached him, he would brighten; he wouldn’t
take his eyes off her. He wound his arms around her tightly as they slept. She tried
to ask him questions. But Peter didn’t like to talk about himself. She’d asked him
how his brother died:

“An overdose of something,” he’d said. “A little of this and a little of that.”

“On purpose, you mean?”

“Well that’s not the way it was explained to me at six, but yeah, on purpose. That’s
one way of saying it.”

She’d asked him how long he’d lived in Iowa.

“Oh, a while,” he’d said. “Too long.”

Sheila walked to the other side of the apartment and poured herself a glass of water.
The front room was large, but there were several small holes in the front window,
the size of bullets.

“The neighborhood did not used to be so good as it is now,” Iva had cautioned.

There were rats in the alleys, with long pink tails. Of course, they only wanted to
eat. Everyone’s garbage was heaped together in piles behind the apartment; who knew
what one could find. The city of Chicago had put up signs in the alleys that said:
TARGET, RATS
! with a crude illustration of a rat electrocuted by a bolt of lightning. Did it mean
that traps were set? Or that tenants should consider setting such traps? The eyes
of the rat in the illustration were exaggeratedly frozen, as if in shock, and it made
Sheila wonder where all these rodents had come from, how all these animals had found
their way to the city in the first place.

Her coyote in Macbride Hall had likely never lived in Iowa like most of the animals
there; it was either shot upon arrival in the Midwest, or it was a gift from scientists
in Nevada or California. It stared straight forward. Maybe they didn’t know how to
arrange it, the limbs and everything. In the case at Macbride Hall, the coyote kept
so still. None of its natural prey and predators were around; there was nothing to
chase, nothing to run from. It was difficult to know one’s own body, surviving in
a place outside of the natural, predetermined one. There was nothing obvious about
what to fear; there was no expectation about what to desire.

In the bathroom that she shared with Peter, his razor sat on the shelf beside her
soap and what her mother would call her
feminine hygiene products
. She remembered her mother encouraging her to wrap up the used applicators in toilet
paper before throwing them in the bathroom trashcan. “Men don’t want to see that kind
of thing,” she’d advised. As if there were a constant stream of strange men visiting
the house rifling through the garbage for evidence of Sheila’s period! Now that she
was actually living with a strange man—or anyway, the only man she’d ever lived with
save her father—she took comfort in the sight of their bodies’ overlap: stray strands
of her hair stuck to his bar of soap in the shower, his used condoms mingling with
her tampon packaging in the trash. The box of tampons boasted in three languages about
the everyday importance of enjoying being woman,
Être une femme, c’est formidable . 
.
 . tous les jours!

Sitting on the toilet, she smiled into her thighs.

One night as they were lying in bed, a woman on the street was yelling up to one of
the apartments nearby, “An accident, you Don Juan asshole? Is that right? I’ll show
you accident!” Sheila heard glass, presumably a windshield, shattering. She heard
a man shouting in a language she didn’t understand. She heard sirens.

Peter wound his arms tightly around her in the bed like he wanted her to know she
was safe.

“You and your boyfriend maybe should be more quiet,” Iva advised one day as they knelt
on the floor of a kitchen, scrubbing side by side.

“Quiet how?” Sheila asked.

“Mmm,” Iva mimicked, “Oh, oh, oh.”

Sheila smiled and stuck up her middle finger, and then she went to squeeze her rag
out in the laundry room sink. Iva followed. She put her head on Sheila’s shoulder
as if to rest for a moment. “A joke,” she said quietly, in truce, in apology. “I know
you have not many of them in this country, but it is only this.”

“At least I’m getting some,” Sheila said.

“Some what?” said Iva.

“It’s an expression,” said Sheila.

“What are you getting? Some sex? Yes, it is obvious because you are very loud.”

Sheila laughed. “Yeah,” she said. “You mentioned.”

Iva said, “I can say, ‘I am getting some,’ and it means I am getting some sex.”

“Also,” Sheila said, “you could ask, ‘Are you getting any?’”

“And it means the same?” Iva looked at her as if incredulous that such innocuous words
could become so loaded in context. Sheila recognized this feeling from French. Put
an accent mark in a different place or switch two letters around and you could think
you were talking about vegetables when in fact you were talking about genitalia.

“Have you been with a lot of guys?” Sheila asked.

Iva began to count off on her fingers. She didn’t get very far before she held her
hands up, but it was still enough that she had to pause to count them.

“I’ve only ever been with Peter,” Sheila admitted.

Iva smiled, “Yes, I know.”

Both women squeezed their rags and went back to their knees in the kitchen.

“I am pleased for you,” Iva said from the other side of the dishwasher. “And the next
time I get some, I will be sure you hear me get some.”

Sheila smiled into her sponge, “C’est formidable, mon ami.” At first, she couldn’t
put her finger on what set her so much at ease being around Iva, until she remembered
that it had been a long time since she had someone she might refer to as her friend.
She thought of Anthony then, of the friend he had been to her in those first weeks
of sharing their lunches in the Large Caf. She pictured him sitting alone now at their
lunch table. His eyes looked the same way they had when he walked away from her after
she’d kissed him. She wished there had been some way to apologize to him. She wondered
if he had asked another girl to the dance. She wondered if the girl had said yes.

Would it be accurate to say that they willfully ignored the fact of their criminal
status? They had been living in the apartment for nearly two weeks now. Their actions
were not something they acknowledged aloud. It was the way it had been with the name,
the way he had used it the first night in the station, and it seemed to initiate this
understanding that she didn’t want to disrupt by talking the thing away. So too with
their crime. Andrea had said the gas station was all over the news. And why wouldn’t
it be? It was no small thing to rob a business and cross state lines in a stolen vehicle.
But Peter and Sheila didn’t have a television or a radio and they made no effort to
seek one out, at least for a time, as if to deny the possibility of danger, like children
who close their own eyes with the hope of not being seen.

But Sheila didn’t need to see the local news at night to sense the danger. She was
starting to feel lingering glances cast in her direction, even the women with whom
she cleaned houses, save Iva, seemed to regard her with a slight sense of distance.
It was difficult to say whether it was because she didn’t speak their language, or
because she was a wanted criminal. After work that day Sheila stopped at the drug
store at the corner and bought, for herself, a box of hair bleach, lipstick, eye makeup,
red nail polish and, for Peter, a pair of black plastic-framed eyeglasses and a pair
of desk scissors—all for under forty dollars. She reasoned it was time to make an
effort to look less like themselves. When she knocked on Iva’s door with the box of
hair bleach, her friend immediately smiled. Sheila sat on the lip of the bathtub in
Iva’s bathroom, while Iva stood behind her in the mirror with plastic gloves on her
hands, massaging the platinum dye into Sheila’s scalp.

“I always thought it would be fun to be a real blond,” Sheila explained innocently.

“Very beautiful,” Iva said. “Like American movie star.”

“Think Peter will be surprised?”

Iva stifled a smile. “I think you will get some.”

Sheila felt the impulse to reach for Iva’s hand, but because it was covered in the
plastic glove, she reached for her wrist. Iva was funny in English; she was funny
in French. She didn’t take herself so seriously that she wouldn’t mind laughing at
her own expense. But the times Sheila heard her friend speak in Czech, it filled her
with an incredible sadness that she couldn’t explain. To hear the speed and seeming
force with which Iva spoke to the other women, Sheila felt the Iva she knew was only
a shred of the real woman, what this woman must be like in her own language.

“Iva?” Sheila asked. “What are you doing here?”

A thought crossed Iva’s face quickly, as that other Iva, the version of her friend
that was more solemn, that had survived something. “A chance to begin again. The same
as you, no?” she said.

Sheila looked at the floor.

“Not important,” Iva said. She raised Sheila’s chin with her gloved hand, so that
both women faced the mirror.

Sheila nodded. “Thank you, Iva,” she said.

“It is nothing,” Iva said.

When Peter arrived home from work that night, Sheila had already prepared dinner.
She had applied a coat of nail polish and spent a good half an hour in the bathroom
mirror with the eye shadow and mascara and all the various accompanying brushes. Soaked
in black paint, her eyelashes were longer than she could have imagined. Everything
about her was exaggerated. She felt like the animated or Technicolor version of herself.
Then she sat and waited for him at the table, waited for him to notice her.

It didn’t take long. The second he opened the door he took a step back.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

Sheila turned. “You like it?”

He walked quickly to her. He reached out for her waist and pulled her to him. Sheila
smiled. She thought he was going to kiss her, but then he pulled her away just as
quickly, his hands still on her waist.

“What the hell are you doing?” he said quietly. “Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?” Sheila asked.

Peter eyed her with a look of reprimand.

“You look like her,” he said.

“Who?” Sheila said.

“Who,” Peter repeated, half a laugh. He gave her hair a little tug. He kissed her
then, but the kiss was rough and difficult. He wasn’t kissing Sheila; he was kissing
the other woman. “You’re going to drive me crazy,” he said simply.

“You started it,” said Sheila.

Peter nodded. “Yes,” he said.

“That’s not why I did it anyway,” Sheila said. “You know we need to disguise ourselves,
our identities. Don’t pretend you don’t think about it.”

“About what?” he asked.

Sheila stared. “We broke the law, Peter,” she said. “We’re wanted criminals. People
are looking for us.” She went into her handbag and produced the black plastic glasses
she had purchased for him. She held them out. “I tried them on in the store. There’s
no prescription. The lenses are a little scratched, but if you squint you can still
read and see enough of everything.”

“I don’t wear glasses,” he said.

“Well now you do,” she said. “Try them on.”

Obediently, Peter placed the eyeglasses on bridge of his nose.

Sheila nodded. “Good,” she said, reaching into the plastic bag to reveal the scissors
as well. “And after dinner we’ll see about your hair.”

Several nights later, Sheila woke up cold. First she noticed only that the sheet was
missing, crumpled in a heap at the foot of the mattress, half on the floor. It was
as she sat up to retrieve the blanket that she noticed that Peter was not in their
bed. She heard a mumbling sound and saw the bathroom light was on; she stood up from
the mattress to investigate only after fifteen minutes had passed and Peter had not
returned.

The first thing she identified was that the kitchen tap was left running. Sheila turned
off the faucet and advanced toward the light in the bathroom. In the bathroom, the
tap was also running. Beneath the sink, Peter was sitting on the bathroom floor with
a glass of water in his hand. Between gulps from his glass he mumbled something under
his breath, something Sheila couldn’t make out. Once his glass was empty, he reached
to the running faucet and refilled it, then repeated the action. Sheila watched this
continue for several minutes before she crouched on the floor beside him and placed
her hands on his shoulders.