Rag Page 7

  I’m sorry, I tell him. You’re dead. I’m sorry.

  Shut up! You shut up!

  Please, I beg him, just leave us alone.

  Honey, open the door, Mom says. Lunch is ready.

  Don’t, Michael hisses, don’t you dare! You finish it!

  I can’t. I don’t want to. I squeeze my eyes shut and I imagine something covering his face, his body, a kind of black patch blotting him out. He was less than a pound when he was born, smaller than a person’s hand. I imagine scooping him up and putting him somewhere outside, away from me, and closing the door. It should be easy to get rid of something so little and helpless, something that hardly even exists. But it isn’t.

  He goes on yelling. Shhh, I keep saying, she’ll hear you, but Michael isn’t listening and the door is opening behind me. I look in the mirror, to see what Michael thinks we should do, but it’s only my own head there, pale and afraid.

  Honey, Mom says, her voice rising in a panic, What is this—

  Nothing, I say, I’m just—

  But she’s got her hands on me, yanking at the towel until it falls, revealing my arm, how red and open it is, and for a moment we both stare at the wound as it pulses, strong, alive.

  What did you do? she whispers, Oh, my baby, what did you do, and Michael shouts You stupid bitch, don’t you get it? I wanted to live. I just wanted to live.

  THE LOVER

  SHE WAS the only white girl at St. Therese, crouched in the yard on a strip of dead grass, whispering to a weed that grew near the fence. I stood across the street, in the mouth of Mick’s liquor store, watching her. She wasn’t pretty. Round face like a moon, thin lips, eyes too wide and too far apart. But that hair she had—gold and thick, all the way down to her waist—was something else. A fairy tale. She was eight and I looked about fourteen and when I went over to the fence to talk to her she didn’t move. What’s your name I asked. She didn’t answer, so I answered for her: Margaret, your name is Margaret. Maggie, she corrected, quiet but not shy, deliberate. You know who I am? I said. She nodded, once. I tapped the fence with my foot. Raphael, she said. Yeah, I said. Ramie to my friends. She looked up, her eyes climbing the fence, and said Is it true you have a gun under your jacket all the time and I laughed. Yeah, I said. She didn’t flinch.

  It was five years before I talked to her again. I waited. I watched. That was all.

  When the Dane came everyone thought he was one of the do-goody types from the suburbs who would stay a year at most. He wore these nice white shirts with the sleeves rolled up and ironed his jeans and smiled with half his mouth and never yelled or even opened his eyes all the way. He had a heavy accent and one of the kids asked where he was from and he said Denmark and the kid laughed in his face, not even knowing what Denmark was, but the Dane didn’t care. He was like Maggie that way; only one or two things really got under his skin and most people never found out what they were.

  With Maggie he knew better than to say anything. He squatted beside her at the fence, looking at her weed. It’s a thistle, she said, and he took a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lit it. Which was against the rules. She looked up, smoothing the pleats in her pale neck, and he looked down, blowing the smoke to the side of her face. Yeah, he said. It is. You like plants?

  She nodded.

  He ashed his cigarette through the fence. Me too, he said. I lit my own cigarette, mirrored him breath for breath. His eyes met mine. I felt the nose of the gun, the one Mick’d given me, slide against the sweat above my ass. He stared. She smiled.

  There are human plans and there are other plans. I was part of the other one, for Maggie, and even, in a way, for the Dane, and to some very small degree for Mick. But it was her I was here for. And she knew it. St. Therese hadn’t been a real Catholic school for twenty years; the care center bought the building for the girls, none of whom had any real religion at all, except for Maggie. Retard Maggie. Slut Maggie. Bitch Maggie. The teachers thought she was stupid, because of how slowly she moved, how she never looked them in the face, even when they screamed. The Dane knew better than to feel sorry for her; I don’t think he felt sorry for any of those kids. Which is why they liked him so much. But she was the favorite, though he was careful not to show the others, not even to show himself; he talked to her in the mornings, at the fence, he put his hand on her back when she passed through the door. That was enough. He kept an eye on her, the way I did, knowing she was different.

  His first summer there they had a Fourth of July party, hot as hell and no shade at all, eating sandwiches and lemonade Mick gave them for free. None of the teachers wanted anything to do with Mick but when he gave you something you took it. The Dane was joking around with the kids, shooting baskets, imitating their dance moves, while Maggie drifted along the fence, watching. When the bell rang she stayed behind as the other girls went inside. The Dane was sitting on a bench, head tilted back to get the last of his lemonade, and Maggie went right over to him and touched his throat. Just put her hand on him and left it there. The Dane paused. Looking at her out of the sides of his eyes. She looked back. He put the cup down and took her hand in his and said You can’t do that. Why? she asked. You just can’t, he said. She tried to do it again and he squeezed her fingers, firm, and said No. Angry with her in his quiet way. Another girl would have cried but she didn’t. Just stood there for a moment before yanking her hand free to slap his face. Hey! he yelled, jerking backward, and she ran to the bathrooms, her hair streaming behind her. Later he would go after her, hold her, let her say I love you, I love you. Her hot face pressed against his shirt. But for a long moment he just sat there, on the bench, looking between his knees as if he’d lost something in the dirt.

  Two years later Maggie was fostered out. Packed up into the social worker’s Honda, hair washed and braided, her hand clutching the strap of a brand-new backpack. The Dane waved from the curb but it was me she glanced at, me she gave the sign: I will return. Later the Dane saw me smoking on the curb and came through the gate and said You shouldn’t do that. I flicked ash on the tip of his fancy shoe. He sat next to me. Asked for a light. But I wasn’t one of his girls and it didn’t suit me to sit there like we were friends, because we weren’t, and I stood up and went inside the shop.

  So much of my work was waiting. I looked older and older. Mick moved me up from security in the store to other things, anything, driving him around or picking things up or getting things he needed from people who didn’t want to give it. Once on a job I got hit in the face and half a tooth fell out of my mouth and when Mick found out he hit me so hard the rest of the tooth fell out, too. So you’ll remember to keep your hands up, he said. I remembered. I wasn’t watching the school anymore or running into the Dane because he was gone, and St. Therese fell apart a girl at a time and the weed grew and grew.

  She came back, nearly fourteen and thinner, her hair past her waist, a true blonde. By then St. Therese was done for, the building shut up and the kids parceled out to other shitholes in the city. It was Mick she came to for help, because she needed money and a place to stay where the people she’d run from wouldn’t find her. I can work, she said, like Ramie, and Mick raised his brow and said You want a gun like Ramie’s? And she shrugged, eye-level with Mick’s chest—she was that short and always would be—but he didn’t scare her and that impressed him. Look, there’s a room, he said, don’t worry about it. He folded a couple of twenties into her little plastic purse and gave her a chocolate bar. I showed her the room next to mine, sat on the cot while she folded her jeans into the particleboard dresser, a baggie of hairpins pooled against the mirror.

  She turned. He’s still here, isn’t he? she asked. I told her I would take her to him. She closed her eyes. Happy. Come here, I said, and she sat down beside me. Looked at my mouth. Your poor tooth, she said. What happened? I shrugged. I fucked up, I said, and she smiled, knowing it was a lie. I wasn’t capable of fucking up. Neither, in a way, was she.

  The Dane was teaching at a school for rich kids and he
had a nice little house with a nice yard and there was Maggie on his doorstep, in a blue skirt and canvas shoes and a big sweater, hands twisting the strap of her purse. Neither of them said a word for a moment. His eyes were red, his cheeks hollow. Well, the Dane said, and then went quiet again. Can I come in? she asked, and he moved aside to let her. He gave her tea and fancy crackers smeared with cheese and raw vegetables and she ate it all; Maggie ate whatever was put in front of her, even things like clams and artichokes, things every other girl she knew wouldn’t touch or know what to do with. She sat in the kitchen, her feet barely touching the floor, and after a long while in that house of his he never married or had any kids in he said Can I see your hair, is it as long as I remember? And she undid it, pin by pin. His dog, a white whippet, stood near the stove and trembled. The Dane had changed, suffered something in her absence, and there was more room in him than before; she could see her opening and she took it without moving an inch from her seat. Just sat there and showed him that he could have her when it occurred to him to have her.

  When I wasn’t with Mick and she wasn’t with the Dane we slept in the same bed. How can you stand it when Mick goes with other guys she said, touching the dark feathers on my wings. I said I didn’t love Mick the way she loved the Dane. What other way is there? she wanted to know. She believed in things the way a child would, with absolute certainty; there was one true love and that was it. We sang along to the radio and I washed her hair and she lay with her head over the bed to let it dry, leaving a long stain on the blanket.

  It was important to the Dane that no one see her come into his house, so she came only at night, through the back door, with a key he’d given her, worn always around her neck. After he fell asleep she would go out into the garden to pull weeds or pick snails off the vegetable beds, his garden more beautiful than any place she had ever been, even in the dark. When he woke up he knew where to look for her, going to the door bare-chested to watch her run her hands over the grass, smiling, before calling her in to make omelets, which she ate sitting on his lap, folding the egg in a piece of toast. Other nights he read out loud with her cheek on his thigh, histories or big novels, and they watched movies and ate dinners of pasta and fish. But then he would be done eating the pasta or reading the book and she would still be there. He was a loner, he was used to sleeping by himself, there were things he wanted to do, he said, and he couldn’t do them with her staring at him all the time. Putting her mouth on his knuckle while he was trying to say something to her. Something important. Listen to me, he would tell her. Goddammit, Maggie, listen! And she would bow her head to show that yes, she would listen, she would be good, but she wanted to stay, and would he let her, and then she would be crying and he would be holding her and it always ended up one way, with his mouth on hers or her hand between his legs and neither of them saying another word and by then it was early morning and another night gutted, him unshaved and driving her home in the early morning, Maggie silent and burning beside him.

  She got her period, breasts, hips, but her skin stayed the color of cold milk, no zits, no makeup. She never cut her hair. Mick called her the Virgin and she was, even after the Dane fucked her, though he skirted her hymen for months. We’re in hell, the Dane whispered in her ear when it happened, inside her for the first time. This is hell. Though he was an atheist. She bled all down her thighs and he put his hands over her mouth to keep her quiet, though she wasn’t making any sound at all, and he glued his face to her neck and wept for hours and fucked her for hours and she was lying there letting it happen, making it happen, her legs around his waist, somewhere beyond pleasure.

  He broke it off again and again. She didn’t argue when he threw her out. Enough, he’d say, ripping her clothes from his closet, his dresser drawers, her hairbrush cracking on the floor. This is crazy. You’re crazy. I like women, I want a woman, don’t you understand? His days were full of children, at the schools, needing him, adoring him, what did he want with one more, one who never left him alone, it made him sick, he couldn’t take it any longer. She just stood there, watching him. What are you, deaf? he yelled. She called me and I came to get her. She’d fold herself up in her room and wait and eventually he’d call and it started again, harder, darker, those hours in the yard, asking him why he was letting the roses die, why the lettuces weren’t coming up, and the Dane on the back steps, no longer smiling.

  Still, she made promises to herself: they were going to get married. They were going to move to another city. They were going to have children and more dogs and a cat and a bird and two cars and vacation every summer on the coast. He had a koi pond and she lay on her stomach and talked to the fish. She had paper dolls he had given her when she was younger, and she still played with them, folding the dresses around the figures and trotting them up and down the pillowcase. We went to the movies and to the mall and played cards and I didn’t let her smoke pot or get the tattoo she wanted, the Dane’s name on her ankle; she was sixteen and she still listened to me. She still talked to plants. But she also worked the bar at Mick’s strip club and she wore a black tie with her white shirt and cleaned the glasses and didn’t say a word to anyone. The Dane didn’t know about that. She said he would flip. There were things he didn’t want to understand, didn’t ask. Where she got money or how she really lived, dropping her off at the liquor store in the shittiest part of town. He pretended it had nothing to do with him. If she had wanted something nice to happen to her she would have chosen someone nice. But she hadn’t. She’d chosen him.

  He took her somewhere. Overnight at some campground. She borrowed pants from me, a heavy jacket, two shirts. She brought a bottle of Mick’s liquor and they drank it all and he gave her a ring that was his mother’s. Took it back the next morning, her screaming as he pulled it off her finger. Said he was drunk. That she was some sort of witch. Is it true what you said, she asked, by this time on her knees in the dirt, staining my best jeans. What did I say, he asked, stepping away from her as if from a snake. The back of his hand to his mouth. That you love me more than anything, she said. Get up, he told her, and it was like that time on the playground, when she’d touched him and he told her no; she got to her feet and hit him, and he took it, helpless, astonished by her, still.

  By their third winter together he was spending his days at the kitchen table with only the stove light on. She gathered the empty bottles and trashed them, brought him more. Don’t buy me beer, he said, I don’t want you to do that, who would even sell that shit to you? She just set the bags in front of him, sat while he opened the next bottle. Mick’s beer and her money. You need to be in school, he said. Drinking the whole time. He said You need to do something with your life or I’m calling the police. She smiled. Waited for the moment she could put her arms around him and he would let her, his nose tucked in her elbow, searching for the sweet smell beneath her white blouse. I knew that smell. It always reached me, no matter where she was. I told her not all men wept as often as the Dane. But you do, she said. You cry all the time. She thought it was because of Mick. But it was because of her. The way she sat at that table. The sound of those bottles in her arms.

  The Dane left the school for rich kids where he was teaching. It was either that or they would fire him and he said to Maggie This is it. I have to go to these meetings and I have to clean this house up and if you love me you’ll leave me alone. She said Let me help you and he said You can’t. He was seeing another woman but was still coming to get Maggie at ten at night to take her somewhere to kiss her, fuck her, cry into her neck. Her hair was coming out in handfuls and she showed him the white patches on her scalp she hid with all those pins. Get some help, he begged. She slammed the car door, caught her jacket in it, ripped herself free. Walking off into the dark. Maggie, he called. Maggie wait.

  Tell me what’s going to happen, she said. I braided and unbraided her hair, in one row, two rows, three, my fingers working the satin strips. I saw her at one end of her life, a tiny white dot, pulsing; and at the other
, enormous, searingly bright for one last moment, then blinking out to nothing. I don’t know, I said. Pray.

  She started dancing in Mick’s club and no one was happy about it, especially not Mick, but she insisted, she was climbing up onstage in her busboy clothes and no matter how many times me or Mick dragged her off or slapped her face she just kept getting up there until Mick gave in. She kept her bra on and her panties on and looked the guys a little too hard in the eye. They threw money in her face; she wouldn’t take the bills, wouldn’t touch any part of them. That’s what drove them wild. Their own willingness to put up with her shit, her thinking she was so superior. When the Dane found out—he followed her, he watched her dance and then vomited in the parking lot—he threatened to call the cops. I’m eighteen, she said, I can do what I want. She said Take me back. But he couldn’t. Mick took half her money and she put the rest away in her drawer next to the paper dolls and the jewelry the Dane had given her, little silver bracelets and a barrette, Christmas gifts she never wore because they were too precious. Nine years and what he’d given her fit in that one drawer.

  When she finished her shift I collected the pins she took from her hair in the palm of my hand. Her fingers crawling around her head. Loosening all that gold. I never did get used to it. Neither did the Dane. She hadn’t seen him in three months. Raphael, she said, help me.

  I came to his house. He said You’re the one from the liquor store. I said yeah and could I come in. He let me. I said You know Maggie wants to talk to you. He got this look, angry, sick of her. I can’t, he said, I told her already. Why I asked. He looked at me. Thought he saw me, but he saw only the mask I put on for him, little Ramie, Mick’s bitch, skinny kid missing a tooth and spitting when I talked. He didn’t see the wings, the solid gold inside me. Why, I asked again. She knows why. She knows exactly, he said, and shook his head. You kids, he said. You don’t think anything’s wrong with anything you do. You mean her working at the club? I said. Working for that fucking gangster, he replied. Wasting her life with a bunch of fucking criminals. I could smell the beer on his breath: Maggie’d told me he’d be drunk. Which I’d already known. I saw her whenever I wanted and I saw him, too. I’d seen them for years and years. Even before they were born. Maggie understood this but the Dane wasn’t a believer and he didn’t have any idea. You’re a silly bastard, I said, and he curled his lip. What did you want, Ramie? I knew at that moment Maggie was carving herself up in her bedroom. If I was quick I’d have time to see the light go out of her eyes.