Circling the Drain (6 page)

Mina swayed a bit on her pointy little heels, and jabbed her glass in the air.

Here's to chasing love and good luck in the Big Apple. I can't believe you're deserting us after all these years to go off to the big city but I know we all wish you the best, she jabbed a final time. May all your dreams come true!

Everybody gulped and then threw away their cups and the party was over. They scooted back to their cubicles, carrying slices of homemade cake, licking their fingers and laughing.

11.

On the way home from her office, knowing that the bus to New York left at seven the next morning, Ellen felt the need to do something brave to mark the evening. To place a flag
on this page of her life somehow, so that later, someday, when she and Billy were married, she would be able to flip back to BEFORE, to the flat, Midwestern landscape of her life UP TO THEN, and remember the risks she'd taken.

She hadn't known what to do until she walked by the shop—a place she'd passed so many times before without paying any attention. Tonight the red neon sign blinked at her, beckoning. Here was daring itself whispering for her to come inside.

She wandered into the place almost as if in a dream. The walls were covered by drawings and photographs—so many choices. In the corner was a short, sweaty, much-illustrated man, who sighed at her.

What is it, lady?

Ellen had trouble speaking. The man sat on a wooden stool and held a needle casually with one hand, shoving his glasses back on the bridge of his nose with the other. He looked tired.

What do you want to do?

It took almost an hour and it hurt a lot, but the tiny
Billy
, surrounded by small white flowers at the base of her spine, was out of her line of vision—its dull ache the only reminder that Ellen had marked herself, and the moment, forever.

12.

She stayed awake on the bus to New York, afraid of the too-friendly or unfriendly passengers, of what could happen while she was sleeping. She had deep bloody welts in the soft flesh at the base of her thumb and on both wrists from digging with her nails to stay alert. Somewhere in eastern
Pennsylvania she couldn't hold out any longer. Sleep came like a heavy red curtain closing quietly for intermission.

When she woke, panting, either five minutes or five hours later, she found herself standing in the middle of the aisle when lucidity set in. All those eyes: the fat brown man, the woman in the plaid overcoat, the couple from Iowa like a matched set of bleached gnomes, the young woman with a weepy infant, the tall blond man folded into the small seat behind her. All staring at her as she spun slowly in the aisle and then sank back into her seat. Everything was intact, nothing missing. Billy would be waiting at the other end, at the station. Everything was fine, quiet and fine.

13.

While a nurse bathes her, Ellen finds she is encased in white plaster, notices the cast that begins at her wrist and continues up and under the covers. The nurse speaks and Ellen watches as though she is very far away in a tunnel, and then she
is
in a tunnel. Slowly moving through a metal tube. Light blinking all around her, the table that holds her vibrating slightly.

Then Ellen is back in her bed, which is lined in pink petals, and a lady holds pictures in front of her. There is a lizard and then a finger. A Band-Aid, a flashlight, a fish. By the time the lady holds up a picture of a farm with a silo like the one she visited as a child, her uncle's place, Ellen is bawling silently, tears dampening her hair and pillow, eyes swelling into sleep.

But sleep and awake have become more distinct. There are dreams when Ellen sleeps now, instead of blank space,
and while it is often difficult to determine where dreams melt into reality, they feel familiar, which is comforting.

Sometimes Ellen dreams of Billy's small room near the river, though Billy himself is never there. Sometimes she dreams of the bridge and sometimes of flying high above the city of Manhattan with her arms outstretched and her hospital gown billowing behind her. In these dreams she is frequently followed by the angel and sometimes that feels wonderful and sometimes it feels like being chased.

14.

New York City, life with Billy—Ellen had never known anything like it. It was as though her black-and-white life had been painted, a knob tweaked and color released. Billy colored everything. When she leaned into the chipped mirror on her dresser she saw herself through Billy's gaze. She saw her straight brown hair, her dimples and her wide eyes as she imagined Billy saw them and sometimes she closed her eyes and pressed her forehead against the cool glass of the mirror and she saw Billy. She felt him with her when she went to the bank, when she walked down the humming streets, when she sat on a bench in the park. She felt him as a constant presence that flushed her cheeks and cradled her heart.

Then the boy sliced her life open and Ellen saw that it was empty.

After—in the days and weeks before she wandered down to Delancey and out over the water—Ellen felt Billy's betrayal as a huge gaping hole, a hollow windy cavern in the center of everything she was. And in that time, when she
closed her eyes and pressed her face against the cool glass, she couldn't peel away the blur that covered Billy's face in her mind, she couldn't make out his features. And when Ellen faced herself in the chipped mirror on her dresser, she saw absolutely no one at all.

15.

At first the city's tiny spaces with their dorm-size refrigerators and their limited passageways, all available space crammed with things, with shelves of things, stacks of things, loft beds and trundles to maximize space, at first this had been intriguing, like barely understanding a new language—getting the gist of things, missing others. In the beginning Ellen loved the dainty things people bought: quarts of milk, not gallons; pints of ice cream, not cumbersome boxes; single rolls of toilet paper, no big plastic packs. It was a concrete difference between the city and home; it seemed charming and exotic.

Then, when she'd been living with Billy for a while, she began to see the buying of tiny things as wasteful and childish. It struck her that these sizes were purchased as though life would continue only in the moment they were now experiencing. If that moment never connected itself to the next moment no one would run out of anything. And yet one moment always bled into the next, and Billy and Ellen always ran out of things packaged too daintily to heed their rate of consumption.

But the day Ellen jumped off the bridge, she finally understood the meaning of the small things. They were little wishes, daily prayers. They were thousands of voices, unable to speak, pleading for miracles.

16.

Ellen remembers words for things:
I jumped off a bridge and did not fly. I am in a hospital
. And she remembers things: her legs, for example, were under her when she stood and they moved independently to maneuver her around. Her arms gripped the railing while her legs climbed over it. She kept her eyes squeezed shut, felt the air buzz around her. She held her breath and, for a moment, expected to see Billy's face somehow, to see his outstretched arms below. She held on backward with one foot over open air and then the other, one foot over the blur far below, across open paper-sharp air, and then the other.

Ellen stepped into nothing.

She opened her eyes, clawing the air for something to grab onto. She swung back at the bridge and touched iron, steel, before she began to tumble, before her legs flew back over her head and her body arced slowly in the air. As Ellen fell, the air sparkled all around her and she understood suddenly, forcefully, that she had made a huge, serious mistake. But then her body dropped like a speeding stone and Ellen wished for land beneath her feet or the wings to fly.

17.

In her dreams Ellen can sing, though only while airborne and only while circling the city, which she tries to do for as long as possible so that she can feel her voice swell and vibrate within her, can feel it dance out on the watery sky. She can see for miles when she flies, can see the brown-stones and avenues of Brooklyn, the smokestacks across the Hudson, planes circling and landing, a tugboat scooting by
on Newtown Creek, a scrawl of green beyond the skyscrapers, the sharp and sooty towers of the city. The elegant arched bridges.

She sings nursery rhymes, gospel songs and hymns, camp songs, folk songs, jingles—anything she can remember—until her voice feels sore and scraped. Until it begins to crack from the strain of it and then she starts to fall. And then she wakes up.

This happens again and again. When she wakes she knows where she is: in the hospital, and she is always cold. Her hands sting with it, her cheeks feel flushed and icy. Her hospital gown is slightly damp.

18.

Ellen feels ready when the angel comes again. She waits for him, listens for him, and when he finally brushes into the room, she thrusts a hand out to stop him and hisses with all her might. She hisses like a cat—it is all she can think to do—but her pure, icy fright makes her powerful, gives her the wisdom to act without question. Her heart thunders but her hand is steady.

The angel's wings flap a little, birthing a gentle breeze that flickers the candlelight. Then the angel tilts his head at her and his features melt into Billy's and Ellen begins to cry.

You bastard, she spits at him. You fucking bastard.

All at once the anger and the loneliness, the unstoppered fury and rancid desolation comes rushing out, and Ellen weeps openly, her hands clenched in fists, her body choking out air.

And the angel just stands there, flapping his wings and staring, but he doesn't touch her. He stays by the door.

I once lived with a painter named Lina who was unable to hear things. By this I don't mean she was deaf, but that she didn't seem to understand things people tried to tell her. Certain messages were simply omitted.

Lina's hair was dark and thin, her features sharp and angry. Late in the evening on the day that I moved in, we sat sipping hibiscus tea in her grimy living room. She was curled in a tiny knot on the couch and I sat across from her in an uncomfortable wooden chair. There was a more comfortable chair nearby, but a sticky gray stain covered most of its seat. When she wasn't smiling, Lina looked like a mean little yappish dog but she spoke in a soft, pleasant voice.

She told me about her boyfriend.

I'm in love with a sailor named Ernie, she said. But a long-distance relationship is so difficult.

I nodded my agreement. Near one pale, putty-colored pillow the cloth seemed to rustle and writhe and I was a little concerned there might be bugs in the sofa, but I fought the urge to squirm.

How long have you been seeing each other? I asked.

Three years, she said softly, and exhaled, pulling her black cardigan tighter around her bony shoulders. Though he says we can't be together. I have such a hard time with that.

What do you mean?

He says he's dating someone else, that things are not happening between us. It's hard to be your girlfriend, I told him, but he just shook his head and said
stay away from me
.

She closed her eyes. So now we have this long-distance thing. But it's so hard.

I nodded. Lina picked at the pink fabric covering the battered couch. She looked tiny and forlorn. All around us hung her paintings: portraits of bugs—of fleas and flies, of beetles, roaches and silverfish. Recently she'd stopped painting them and moved on to canvases covered in genitals, hundreds of purple cartoon genitals with tiny bared teeth.

Everything about the place was filthy: coated with a film of dust or grime. The room was also full of boxes—hundreds of small painted boxes covered every surface. I thought I saw one move, but I tried to be polite about it. I drew my knees closer, smiled and nodded.

I was determined that this should work out, if only because I wanted to worry about the adventure of living my life and not housing. I hadn't brought very much. Until I could afford a mattress, I slept on an inflatable raft taken from my parents' basement. I kept my clothes in a plastic milk crate. I painted the walls of my room green and the ceiling blue, so that it felt like a clean, fresh place that belonged to me.

 

I soon discovered that Lina was convinced the police were looking for her. When I woke she appeared in my doorway and asked that I not leave the apartment.

They're out there, she said, pointing towards the front door. They've come for me.

I didn't understand what she was getting at, and said so.

I got a jaywalking ticket and gave a false name and now they're after me.

That's ridiculous, I told her. I'm sure they're not looking for you.

I headed for the door but she blocked it with her body.

No, they'll find me, she hissed.

I pushed her aside and poked my head out in the hall. There was no one around.

 

A job opened up at the restaurant where Lina cooked and I was hired as a waitress.

Since Lina was the only person I really knew, we took cigarette breaks together. I didn't smoke, but I would go just to keep her company. Lina fascinated me. She'd explode from silence all of a sudden to tell about something she'd been thinking about for days, so that sometimes our smoking breaks were utterly quiet and sometimes they were filled with her strange angular ideas.

She believed, she told me once, that if her hair found the perfect cut it would stop growing.

She believed weather was controlled by mood, not mood by weather.

She believed that stray kittens should be left to their own devices, but that dirty children should be rescued.

I was a dirty child once, she told me late one evening. All grimy and eager and no one paid a leaf of attention to me.

I breathed in the night air and watched the smoke curl around her sharp face. She made herself angrier as she talked and I just nodded at the right places.

I was a well-meaning kid but no one took the time to care, they just knew my shoes were worn and my hair was full of lice. I should have been taken home instead of the kittens people were always leaving saucers of milk on their front porch. I should have had a saucer of milk. I should
have been taken home and rinsed off and given a biscuit and a dry place to sleep.

She blew a long stream of smoke, stubbed out her cigarette and went back in the restaurant.

Lots of our breaks were like that. At first I tried to tell Lina things too, but eventually I came to understand how much she couldn't hear and so I mostly listened. Whenever I did ask for her advice, it confused me. I suspected she might be a little bit crazy, but, for the time being, she was all I had.

 

A few weeks later Lina came home with an ashy gray X on her forehead.

What did you give up for Lent? I asked, half joking.

She looked me evenly in the eyes. Eating, she said, and went to her room.

You can't give up eating, I told her, but that just made her angry. She stormed from her room to the kitchen, where I leaned against the counter.

What do you know?! she demanded. Tell me, Miss Just Out of School, what do you know?!

I didn't have much of an answer and so Lina stopped speaking to me. At first I tried to make headway. I left her notes on the refrigerator that she didn't read or answer. At work I waited out back for her to come and smoke but she didn't.

What's up with Lina? I asked the bartender. She won't talk to me, even at home.

Oh, she's just like that, he said. Don't bother hanging your ass out a window over it. Her capacity for friendship runs about six weeks. I'd say your meter's probably up.

 

The days unfolded one after the other and Lina continued to drink juice and look wildly hungry. She was always cloaked in black, which accentuated the dark circles under her eyes. At home I found her lying on the floor with her feet in the air or curled up in a corner of the couch watching TV. Every so often she flicked the remote. The sound was off.

Are you okay? I always asked.

Sometimes she glared at me but mostly she just ignored my presence altogether.

 

Then Lina began making new rules.

You may no longer use the bathroom after eleven, she told me one evening, her little hands balled into fists. I was so excited to hear her speak that it took a few minutes for the words to sink in.

Lina, that's ridiculous, I said, but she just walked away.

Then the rules came like flies: You may not look out the living room windows or sit on the couch. You mustn't take a trash bag without asking me first. You may not answer the phone until it has rung three times. You must always eat in your room.

I hadn't any money to move, so for a while I adjusted. I did my best to tiptoe around and tried to be extremely careful about the bathroom, but it was greatly inconvenient.

 

I finally moved out when Lina forbade my use of water.

You disturb me, she said. You're always drinking and washing, drinking and washing. You hamper my creativity and that prevents me from making art.

By then I'd had enough.

That's it, I told her. I'm leaving. I'm moving out.

You should get a cooler and some jugs, she said. You can take sponge baths and pretend your room is a bomb shelter.

We faced each other in the hallway. Her tiny feet were planted fiercely against the terrible encroaching world. Above her head, hundreds of plum-colored genitals gnashed their little teeth at me.

I'm out of here, I said. You're a horrible roommate. You should be living alone.

You need to wipe your feet in the hallway, she whispered. It's your turn to dust.