You Remind Me of Me (3 page)

“You lie,” she said. She smiled secretively, then let forth another stream of smoke, her lips puckered like a child blowing soap bubbles. “You’ve got to be a better liar if you’re ever going to get a girl to kiss you.”

“Yeah, right,” he said, and frowned. This was a game that people sometimes liked to play with children—“How many girlfriends do you have?” they would ask, or “I’ll bet those little girls chase you all around the playground!”—and he didn’t have much patience with this kind of teasing. He turned his attention to his cereal, sinking his spoon into the soup of milk and floating apple-flavored O’s intently, ignoring her, expecting her to lose interest and move on to another room.

Around them, the trailer was silent. He could hear the hum of the fish tank’s bubbler, the insistent awakening chirp of sparrows nested in the eaves and awnings of the trailers, or in the trailer court’s single cottonwood tree. He made a slurping sound when he brought his spoon to his lips, just to annoy the quiet, and noticed that Chrissy was still observing him expectantly.

“Can I have a bite of your cereal?” she said at last.

He shrugged. “Okay,” he said, but when he started to push the bowl toward her, she did something unnerving. She pushed her hair behind her ears and leaned forward, closing her eyes lightly and opening her mouth. She wanted him to feed her.

It was weird, he thought, and he hesitated. But she sat there with her mouth open, and after a moment he held his spoon out. He watched as she slowly closed her lips over it. Her eyes opened as she swallowed.

“Mmmm,” she said. “That tastes good. Thanks.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. He set the spoon back on the counter, not sure what to do with it now that it had been inside her mouth. He had seen the inside of her lips, which were slick and pink and glistening. And her tongue. He wasn’t sure what to think about it.

But she didn’t act as if anything unusual had happened. He watched as she lifted her cigarette, blowing on the tip of it so that the ember glowed orange through the gray crust of ash. Then she stubbed it out. She smiled.

“Can I ask you a question?” she said. He just shrugged. Her attention was not particularly welcome, but it was also hypnotic in a way he didn’t quite understand.

“I heard from Bruce that you’re adopted,” she said. “Are you?”

“Yeah,” he said. “So?”

“So nothing,” she said. “It’s just that I was adopted, too, so I thought that was interesting. I mean, you don’t meet many other people who are adopted, do you?”

“I guess not.”

“You guess not,” she repeated. She regarded him steadily for a moment, her expression hooded. Then she smiled. “You’re funny,” she said. Then: “So what do you think about it? About being adopted?”

“I don’t know,” he said. The truth was, he
didn’t
think about it very much, and certainly never talked about it. He’d always regarded this fact about himself as both unimportant and private, like people’s belly buttons. He was adopted.
We adopted each other,
his mother had told him.
God brought us right to you and put us together as a family.
He’d known this from an early age, and he’d been taught that it didn’t matter at all, that he was no different from anyone else. His parents—Earl and Dorothy Timmens—were just as real as anyone else’s parents. But still, it bothered him that Bruce had told this girl about it, and he felt uncomfortable imagining the two of them discussing him. He shrugged, eyeing her suspiciously. “It’s not a big deal,” he said. “Nobody cares about it.”

“Huh,” she said: a short laugh. “Oh, sure they do. You just don’t know it yet.” She made a wry face, her eyes glancing sideways slyly, as if someone might be listening, and she was going to tell him something secret, or dirty. “Don’t
you
think about it? Don’t you wonder about your mother?”

“Not really,” he said. And what else could he say? He looked down, thoughtfully, tracing the fake wood-grain patterns of the counter’s Formica surface. What could he tell her? Could he say that he’d always believed his mother when she told him that he was special—chosen, selected, his mother said. When he was little, he used to listen to a record “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?” He would play it over and over, and in some ways he supposed that he’d always thought his adoption was something like that—that his parents had wandered through a corridor of glass cases containing babies, and that they’d suddenly halted, struck with certainty, in front of a bassinet that contained his infant self. They’d pointed, and a nurse had brought him bundled in a blanket into their arms, a clean and uncomplicated transaction. He’d never much considered what came before that. He knew about sex, about how babies were born, but the idea of being inside someone’s stomach—of being expelled wetly from some woman’s body—seemed grotesque and unreal. In his mind, that person was like a skin he’d shed, a cocoon husk he’d left behind.

“I guess,” he said, “I guess I always figured that it wasn’t very important.” And he shrugged, shifting uncertainly. He was aware of the inexplicable and almost oppressive heaviness of her attention. It was an ability some girls had, he recognized, a power they could draw upon simply by focusing themselves on a single person. His skin prickled as she leaned closer, as her forearm brushed lightly against his and he could see the pale hairs just above her wrist, the rosy smell of lotion and moist, soft pressure of skin brushing against skin, the way her hair grazed his shoulder.

“Oh, well,” she said. She let the pad of her forefinger touch the back of his hand, briefly, smiling at him in a way that wasn’t really a smile at all, but something else—a swallowed sadness, a shudder. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I’m just weird. I’m, like, probably sort of crazy or something. But . . . I think about it a lot. I think, you know, what is she doing now? Like, maybe she’s a singer or a famous actress or something. And what does she look like? And what would have happened if she’d kept me? Do you know what I’m talking about? You could have had this whole other different life, and maybe you’d be different, and, well,
happier
. I mean, I know that I don’t belong in the family I’m living in now, that’s for sure.” She made a face. “Maybe I’m the only one, I don’t know. But do you really think your parents wanted to adopt a baby? Don’t you think that if they’d had the choice they would have had a real baby? I mean, one of their own.”

He didn’t know what to say to this, and so he was silent. From the next room came the sound of thick male coughing, a throat cleared of phlegm. “Fuck,” a sleepy voice muttered sharply, and her eyes shifted toward the sound.

“I feel sorry for you,” she said. “You’re a kid. You shouldn’t be hanging out in a place like this.”

And then, without warning, she kissed him. She tilted her head and pressed her lips against his. He felt her tongue move softly, a little flick along the line of his mouth, and he jerked with surprise. Her hands held his cheeks, and her lips moved against his for a moment before she released him.

“There,” she said. “Now you’ll remember me.”

——

It was about 7:30 in the morning, Saturday, as he walked home, and he could still taste the dark, smoky pressure of her tongue as he hurried through the underpass with its walls of wet, dripping, rust-stained cement, past the little abandoned grocery store with its windows pasted over with newspaper, past the grade school, toward the rows of small houses that made up the street he lived on. As he walked down Deadwood Avenue, a dog barked at him from behind a fence, and a pickup carrying a thin, ancient man in a cowboy hat pulled slowly by on the street. It had been a dry spring, and the yards of the houses were yellow-green, the tired-looking color of the sod that covered the prairie hills on the outskirts of town. St. Bonaventure was little more than a cluster of houses and stores in the middle of a dry plain of wheat fields, asphalt roads, bare, rocky hills. He didn’t think of this often, but he was aware of it at that moment—the great expanse of the world beyond the borders, the woman, the mother he’d once been inside of, out there somewhere. His stomach felt fluttery, and he felt infected by the sadness that Chrissy had given to him with her long, slow look, with the weight of her mouth against his. His heart was still light and quick and hollow in its beating.

Here was his house. Curtains drawn. The screen door with its aluminum curlicue molding.

Inside, his father was asleep on the couch. His parents had been fighting again, and his dad was huddled there under an afghan, curled up, one pale bare foot uncovered, his face severe and drawn and pressed against the arm of the couch, frowning in his dreams. His hair stood up in stiff tufts, and his eyes shifted underneath their lids as Troy tucked the blanket over his exposed foot.

He loved his father. That was what he should have told Chrissy. He loved his mother, who was still asleep in the bedroom. He loved Bruce and Michelle and Ray, all his people, his family. He didn’t want another life.

3

January 6, 1966

At the home for unwed mothers, Nora still holds out hope that the baby will stop growing, that it will die. Around her, the stomachs of the girls are swelling, becoming taut, and their souls are deflating. There is a smell of old fruit and eucalyptus, there is a large box television playing a game show, “What’s My Line,” a dozen expressionless girls staring at the screen, some of them smoking cigarettes or biting on their nails or clasping their hands in their laps. One of them is knitting. Knitting. This girl’s hands move steadily and the skein of blanket or sweater or shawl is slowly, line by line, becoming a cloth that shrouds the lump of her belly. Nora wants to kill this girl, whose face is as blank as a rabbit’s. Or she wants to kill the happy celebrities that the girl is watching as they tell their jokes. Or she wants to kill herself.

She moves along the hallway, walking, creeping, one hand cupped beneath her belly, the other on the wall. She isn’t even showing yet, but still she holds her stomach uncertainly. There is a tickling feeling, like a spider spinning a web inside her, maybe she’s only imagining it. The walls are cold, warty plaster, painted smooth, and she runs her hands across them as if they are braille, supporting herself as she goes. Doors lined up. She suspects that the rooms are all identical, though she hasn’t seen anyone else’s. She knows: a single bed, a night table with a lamp and a Bible, a desk with empty drawers, a closet with identical cheap poly-cotton maternity smocks on hangers, a window with a bare, snowy tree in the center of it.

It is not quite a prison, not quite a hospital. A Home, they call it, in the way they call the repositories for the old and the insane “Homes.”
They put her in a Home,
her father had once said about a neighbor woman who had lost her mind when she got old, and now Nora herself is in such a place. Being watched over. Taken care of. You cannot lock the door to your room in such a place, and her door won’t even stay closed, she doesn’t know why. The air pressure, maybe, the wind, something—she has no way of knowing, but sometimes as she lies in the dark the door will click open like an awakened eye, a shaft of light from the hallway will fall across her face. It happens frequently enough that she has taken to leaning a chair against the doorknob when she goes to sleep.

In the dark, she can’t keep herself from thinking that it is a ghost. She doesn’t believe in ghosts, exactly, but if they did exist they would thrive in a place such as this. Girls have killed themselves here, she is sure of it. It is a deathly place. Silent. Cold. There is the kind of feeling you might have, walking alone through a park in late autumn, when a single leaf falls from a tree and twists slowly to the ground in front of you.

——

January 6, 1966. This is her fourth day of residence in the Mrs. Glass House, her fourth day of captivity, and it is beginning to sink in. There is no turning back. She should have accepted that fact a long time ago, but instead she still finds herself bargaining vaguely with her body, with God, thinking that it’s possible that a mistake has been made. The long months stretch in front of her, and already it seems that she is losing herself. There is nothing to do here but wait, months upon months tunneled in front of her: June, they said, early June most likely. She sits in a chair by the window, reading her book,
The Collector
by John Fowles. It is inappropriate, she knows: “A brutal tormented man and the beautiful, aristocratic young woman he has taken captive,” the back cover proclaims, and the story upsets her.
I hate the way I have changed. I accept too much,
the woman says, and Nora underlines this passage as small glimmering motes of snow pass by outside, as somewhere down the hall a transistor radio is playing AM love songs, the Monkees singing “I’m a Believer!” She reads: “I’m so far from everything. From normality. From light. From where I want to be.” She closes the book and sits staring at her fingers, which don’t seem like her own fingers. It is exactly the wrong book to be reading at the moment, she thinks, though on second thought, a happy book, an optimistic, escapist book would be even worse. If she’s going to read anything at all it ought to be about suffering.

——

She thinks about things that she will never tell people, ugly memories that make her wince when they enter her mind.

Once, she punched herself in the stomach as hard as she could, hoping it would dislodge.

Once, she put something inside of herself—a knitting needle, which is what she had heard they used. But what, exactly, was she supposed to catch hold of with it? She imagined a floating piece of yarn with a glob of cells and blood at the end of it. Hooking it, pulling it out.

Once, she tasted bleach, but couldn’t bring herself to drink it.

——

Have the others done such things? If so, they don’t talk about it. They don’t talk about much, these girls, as if they are all spies. Mostly, they glance at one another furtively—the scratch of silverware against plates, the sound of chewing, the television voices, the soft, private moan a girl will make when she walks down the hall. What is there to say?

“This is not a sorority,” Mrs. Bibb tells them. “Let’s keep our socializing to a minimum, shall we?” It is against the rules for girls to sit in one another’s rooms and speak privately. It is requested that the girls do not reveal the names of the towns they come from, and it is best if they avoid speaking of their pasts at all—the fathers of their babies, the mistakes that have been made, the families they’ve disappointed. It is against the rules for the girls to tell one another their last names, and she suspects that most of the first names are pseudonyms as well. Like the girl who knits, who says her name is Dominique.
Dominique,
like the title of the popular song from grade school, the song by the Singing Nun.

“Oh, really,” Nora says. “That’s an unusual name.” And the knitting girl looks down. She has dark eyebrows that meet in the middle of her face, right above the bridge of her nose, and her chocolate-colored eyes focus on the movement of the needles between her fingers. She is a girl who is used to being made fun of, the sort of girl who clutches her books tightly in front of her and plunges through the hallways of high school like she is walking into a blizzard. Nora knew of a girl like this back in Little Bow, a girl named Alice, which they all thought was funny. A Lice, they called her, and the boys sat behind her and flicked their boogers into her badly permed hair. A man who would make a girl like Alice or Dominique pregnant would have to be entirely evil, Nora decides.

“What are you knitting?” Nora says at last, but the girl keeps her head down stubbornly, as such girls will. Someone, their mother probably, taught them to
suffer silently
, taught them
sticks and stones will hurt my bones, but words will never hurt me,
taught them
a quiet girl is better loved
. Dominique pinches her lips as Nora looks at her.

“Well,” Nora says, after the silence extends for a time. “It’s pretty, whatever it is.”

“It’s a blanket,” says Dominique, finally. “It’s just a blanket. It’s cold in this place.”

“Yes,” Nora says. “It’s going to be a long winter!” she says, reminding herself unpleasantly of her father, his cheerful, commonplace chatter. For a minute she hates him, misses him, hates him, misses him, like flipping a coin or plucking petals off a flower.

——

It will be a long time before she sees her father again. This is another one of the rules: relatives are not allowed to visit the girls at Mrs. Glass House, and she recalls her father’s sorrowful, doubtful eyes as the matron, Mrs. Bibb, recited this to him. Mrs. Bibb is one of the horrors in a long list of horrors, with her orange hair and freckles and her cheerful, caustic blandness. A person incapable of either cruelty or kindness, Nora imagined, only an indifferent
nice
. It was terrifying, listening to her sweet voice, but what could be done? Nora was expressionless as her father looked at her shyly, as if she might advise him, as if she could tell him what to say or think. “Well, I suppose,” he said, and Nora imagined that he was waiting for her to intervene, to lose her nerve, to cry out, “Daddy, don’t leave me in this place!” Mrs. Bibb seemed to be preparing herself silently for just such a scene.

“Honey . . . ?” her father said, but Nora didn’t say anything to him. She stared down at the ribbed upholstery of the easy chair she was sitting in. He knew what she thought, he knew what her decision was.

Originally, his own ideas had been quite different. “Just tell me his name,” her father had said. “I’ll talk to him, he’ll do the right thing. I can promise you that.”

But she shook her head. “No,” she said.

For a while, he’d tried to argue. “It’s his responsibility, too,” her father said. “Believe me, he’d want to know what’s going on. You just have to give him the chance. You think you know everything, Missy, but you know, I think that most men, they think that it’s their baby, too. Men are not so different as you might think.

“Did he rape you, is that it?” her father said.

“Are you protecting somebody? He’s married, isn’t he?” her father said. “If he comes around here, I’ll know it’s him. I’ll know it’s him, and I’ll kill him, you know that, don’t you? I don’t care about me, they can put me in prison, but I’ll kill him.”

“Did he hurt you?” her father said. “Did he threaten you? You don’t have to be afraid to tell me.”

“Don’t do anything you’re going to regret,” he said. “A life lasts for a long time, you may not know that yet.”

Of course, these conversations linger in her mind now that she’s alone. Her father says, “Just let me help you, babygirl. You’re my daughter. I’ll do anything for you.”

——

That is the worst part of it, she thinks sometimes: knowing that she has hurt him perhaps more than she has hurt herself. It aches to think of him, to picture him sitting in the mornings, hunched over his cup of coffee at the kitchen table, licking the lead of his pencil as he fills in the daily crossword in the newspaper, alone in the small house. She knows that he is already thinking of this baby of hers, that he won’t let it go, that it will be on his mind for the rest of his life. She knows that the coldness and stubbornness she’d turned toward him will be like a cloak she has put on, which she can never take off.

But she cannot choose what he wants for her. Her father is a lover of babies, of families, of connection and structure, and she is not. She knows his stories, the events of the past that he’s turned into little trinkets in his mind, telling them over and over, the same words, the same welling of emotion—wet eyes, constricted voice—at the same precise moments in the telling of his sad, sentimental tales. The orphan train, how they picked him up off the streets of New York City when he was only four years old and sent him all the way across the country to be adopted by a cruel farmer and his wife, who didn’t want a child but a slave; how he’d run away at the age of fifteen. Or her mother, so beautiful and young, and him almost twenty years her senior, but they were soul mates from the start, his pretty little brown-eyed Sioux lady, how can he live without her now that she’s dead? And Nora herself, his own babygirl, the way she used to follow him around and imitate whatever he did,
she even wanted to put shaving cream on her face and pretend to shave, just like her daddy!

Oh, these stories—by the time she was fifteen they were almost unbearable. She would feel a smooth airtight window sliding up inside her, impervious to sympathy or pity. “I’ve heard this before,” she’d say softly, but that wouldn’t stop him.

Here at Mrs. Glass House, at least there is silence. At least there are no stories, and she is glad, because she can’t transform what has happened to her into a romance. The boy, the father, is almost gone from her mind now, lingering only in her awareness of her own stupidity. Soon, the baby will be gone, too.

——

But until then, there must be punishment. Humiliation.

Here, at Mrs. Glass House, they are herded from place to place. They move, very docile, single file down the stairs to the basement cafeteria; they are preparing to walk down the hill toward town, where they will eat ice cream and see a movie. Mrs. Bibb distributes “wedding rings,” cheap gold-painted strips of tin, which they are to wear on their left hand, third finger. The Home is said to be a convalescent house for expectant mothers. No one says words like
unwed
, or
bastard
, or
whore
. Certain aspects are pretended. Nora watches as Dominique is given a ring, watches as Dominique slides the ring on, over the chewed fingernail and ugly, wrinkled hillock of finger joint.

They line up. They will be led down the long winding driveway toward the town, young girls in various stages of pregnancy, ripeness, swollen and swelling girls marching single file from the doorway of this place that looks like a haunted house in movies or dreams—The Mrs. Glass House, with its three-story, turreted facade, with its loose gutters and peeling white paint, the long lawn and spike-tipped, curlicued cast-iron fence. If this were a picture, its caption would be:
Dread.
Its caption would be:
The undead stream forth in an endless torrent from the mouth of hell.

——

She covers her mouth at the thought but doesn’t laugh. She focuses instead on the steady crunch of Dominique’s feet against the gravel, the girl’s solemn, gracefully bovine trudge. She focuses on the clot of houses at the bottom of the hill, the tender, dirty nub of a prairie town, with its ice cream parlor and its movie house and its little post office and bank and gas station. There is a satisfaction in knowing that such places are dying their wretched deaths, in knowing that such towns are stumbling, wounded, their young people flowing out and away once they leave high school, draining out of the town like blood. Stupid people, she thinks. What kind of an idiot tries to build a town in the middle of the sandhills, a grassy desert where only sod will grow? These are the same people who would be pleased to act as if the fake rings make some sort of difference, the sort of people who will stare out their windows, deeply content, as the girls drift into their streets. After a moment, Nora slips the tin ring off her finger and lets it fall to the ground. She can imagine a soft “ping” as it hits the gravel driveway. She can picture it rolling down some groove in the ditch, through the dry weeds and mud, off toward some adventure. She thinks of the gingerbread man in the fairy tale.
Run, run, as fast as you can, you can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man.