Eileen (18 page)

I do remember my father's wailing later that afternoon from the foot of the attic stairs.

“What's wrong, Dad?” I yelled, bolting out of bed.

“The phone rang,” he said. “Some woman looking for you. Maybe a lady cop, I don't know.”

“What did you tell her?”

I stomped my foot waiting for his reply.

“Nothing,” he threw up his arms. “I know nothing and said nothing. Mum from me.” I flew down the stairs, found the phone in the kitchen dangling off the hook, receiver thudding against the wooden cabinet.

“Well, hello, Christmas angel,” is how Rebecca answered when I picked it up.

It's important to keep in mind, given what I'm about to relay, which is everything I remember from that evening, that I had truly never had a real friend before. Growing up I'd only had Joanie, who disliked me, and a girlfriend or two here and there in grade school, usually the other class reject. I remember a girl with braces on her legs in junior high, and an obese girl in high school who barely spoke. There was an Oriental girl whose parents owned the one Chinese restaurant in X-ville, but even she discarded me when she made the cheerleading squad. Those were not real friends. Believing that a friend is someone who loves you, and that love is the willingness to do anything, sacrifice anything for the other's happiness, left me with an impossible ideal, until Rebecca. I held the phone close to my heart, caught my breath. I could have squealed with delight. If you've been in love, you know this kind of exquisite anticipation, this ecstasy. I was on the brink of something, and I could feel it. I suppose I was in love with Rebecca. She awoke in my heart some long-sleeping dragon. I've never felt that fire burning like that again. That day was without a doubt the most exciting day of my life.

She told me to come over whenever I felt like it. She said she would be home, “relaxing. We'll just sit and chat here,” she said. “Nothing fancy. It'll be fun. There are some records we can play and maybe dance again, if all goes well.” I remember her kind, measured voice, her words all very clearly. I scribbled her address down—it was not a street name I recognized. I hung up
the phone, nearly swooning, and stood there for a minute, blinded with glee.

“None of your business,” I mumbled at my father when he tapped on the kitchen table to startle me out of my trance.

“Pass me some chips!” he yelled back. He seemed to have forgotten the story of my night out with Leonard Polk. I assumed the lie had been flushed away in last night's gin.

I ran upstairs to get ready. My face in the mirror looked less monstrous than usual. If Rebecca wanted to look at it, maybe it wasn't so bad, I thought. It's amazing what the mind will do when the heart is throbbing. I selected a gray linen suit from my mother's closet, something I thought Rebecca would approve of. Nothing flashy. I must have looked like a dowdy grandmother in that suit, but at the time it felt right—subdued, mature, thoughtful. In retrospect I see that it was what a sidekick would wear, a uniform of service, a blank page. I put on a white nylon slip, a fresh pair of the navy panty hose, my snow boots, my mother's camel coat. I remember these articles of clothing perfectly since they were what I was wearing and all I ended up taking with me of my mother's wardrobe when I left X-ville, after all. Despite my grand plans, I left with just those clothes on my back and a purse full of money, and the gun, of course. I brushed my hair in the mirror. My greasy lipstick seemed suddenly pretentious, cheap, idiotic. I decided to go without makeup. After all, Rebecca didn't wear any. And I suppose my desire to be close with Rebecca, to be understood and accepted by her, allayed my fear of being seen without my mask of cosmetics and indifference.

I remember going and getting the map of X-ville from the car
and galloping like a clumsy deer back inside through the glistening mounds of snow. I was full of energy. When I looked out across the yard, carefully shutting the front door, church bells chimed through the bare trees, and I thought how beautiful the light sky was at that moment, tinged orange and blue as the sun set. I was happy. I really was, I thought. I quickly figured out my route to Rebecca's house, which seemed to be on the wrong side of the tracks, as they say—that barely registered as odd at the time—and then I folded up the map and put it in my coat pocket. I still have that map. It's at home, pinned up on the back of my closet door. Faded and stiff now, I carried it around for years and I've cried over it many times. It's the map of my childhood, my sadness, my Eden, my hell and home. When I look at it now, my heart swells with gratitude, then shrinks with disgust.

Before I left for Rebecca's, I drank some vermouth to calm myself, pulled on my mother's black leather gloves and fox fur hat—her only fur—and said good-bye to my father, who was leaning over the sink, peeling a boiled egg.

“Where do you think you're going?” he asked benignly, slurring.

“Christmas party,” I answered. I grabbed the wine.

He paused, and looked genuinely perplexed for a moment, then said mockingly, “Just as long as you'll be home in time for dinner.” He chuckled and plunked the entire egg into his mouth, wiped his hands on his shirt. The last time we'd eaten a real dinner together was years before my mother's death, perhaps for someone's birthday—chicken burnt to a crisp in the pan, a soggy pot of macaroni. That one boiled egg and a bag of
potato chips was all my father would eat all day. Did I feel bad leaving him that evening? I didn't. I figured I'd be home that night to bear the brunt of his misery, hear all his complaints, maybe have a drink with him in the morning before he left for church and I took my mother's last few pills, which I estimated would put me to sleep for the better part of the day. It should have been sad to leave my father alone on Christmas, but if ever my father felt he was at risk for being pitied, he attacked me with an insult aimed precisely at my self-esteem.

“You're pale as a ghost, Eileen,” he said, reclining back down in his chair. “You could scare small children out of their socks.”

I just laughed at him. In that moment, nothing could hurt me.

I skipped out down the shoveled path and into the black and sparkling wet street. I was on my way to meet my destiny.

 • • • 

N
othing could have added to the pleasure of my anticipation on that drive through X-ville on my way to Rebecca's house that evening—not the calm roads or the softly falling snow, not the homes full of happy little families, not the gay blinking lights strung up on every Christmas tree. Besides my car's stink of exhaust and vomit, the air from outside smelled of roasting ham and cookies, but I had no use for that holiday cheer. I had Rebecca now. Life was wonderful. My little world of exhaust and vomit was somehow wonderful. I watched out the open window as I passed guests arriving at one house, a child carrying a pie in a glass pan, parents bearing gifts of wine
wrapped in red cellophane and ribbon. They looked happy, but I wouldn't envy anyone that Christmas, a holiday best suited to those who thrive on self-pity and resentment. That's what all that eggnog and wine is for, after all. The wine I'd bought for Rebecca sat beside me on the seat, still in the measly brown paper bag from the liquor store. I should have decorated it somehow, I thought. I really ought to have found some wrapping paper, some ribbon. It suddenly seemed disgraceful, insulting really, to show up with such a rough gift. Rebecca deserved better, didn't she? I thought to knock on someone's door or rifle through a garbage can for scraps of candy-striped or holly-patterned prints, but I would never do that. Still, the paper bag was less than ideal.

As though God were listening, when I passed Bayer Street, a long spotlight came on and fell on a nativity scene set up on the snow at the foot of a small hill. I watched an elderly woman swing open the heavy arched door of Saint Mary's at the top and disappear inside. It was the church my father attended every Sunday. I pulled over to take a closer look at the scene, unsure of what was motivating my curiosity. The nativity was simple, just dolls stuck in the snow in front of a piece of brown wooden fencing not more than two feet high. Mary knelt beside Joseph. They were both clothed in burgundy robes tied with twine. There was something wrapped in gold cloth in Mary's arms. I got out of the car. I was inspired.

The nativity figures were made of painted wood and were actually quite beautiful, I thought. I'd loved dolls as a child, but
when I turned six my mother collected them and threw them away. The figure of Mary had a wide grin on its face. When I approached it and stood on the cleared sidewalk, I saw that the mouth had been defaced. Someone had painted over it with what looked like bright red lipstick. Black marker crisscrossed within the lips turned her smile into a jack-o'-lantern smirk. It made me laugh. From inside the church I could hear them singing hymns, a piano jangling brightly above the soft and warbling voices. A child cried. I walked closer to the scene, marking my footsteps in the snow. The cloth wrapped around something meant to be the Baby Jesus was a thick, mustard-colored synthetic material, and it was affixed to Mary's extended wooden arms with masking tape. I removed my gloves and fingered the tape. It was gummy from moisture, but the fabric was soft and satiny. The church music stopped. I listened as the pastor began to pray the liturgy. The sound of it filled me with dread, but that didn't stop me from peeling the masking tape off Mary's arms and yanking at the golden cloth. Underneath was an empty canister of motor oil. I was pleased. In the car, I wrapped the wine in Jesus' blanket. It felt appropriate. I consulted the map and drove on.

Certain images come back to me now. For instance, the cemetery covered in snow, an iridescent blue light cast across its surface, the irregular pattern made by the tops of rounded gravestones peeking up out of the icy crust, and the long, shrinking shadows of trees. The sun having just set, the roads grew darker as I drove across town, streetlamps yellow and hazy, some just flickering. The homes got smaller and closer together. They were
not the grand brick colonials of my own neighborhood, but the washed-out wooden trailer-size homes of the less well-to-do—the poor, to be blunt. Their homes were more like cabins, really, a shantytown style of cheap housing built on the coast. I passed a corner store whose windows were plastered in outdated ads for cigarettes and hand-drawn signs proclaiming the cost of bread, beer, eggs.

When I got to Rebecca's street, I found only a few lights on in the sad, narrow houses. That area was nearer to the ocean, windier than my neighborhood, and the houses seemed to be crouched down, huddling close to the ground, hiding. There were chain-link fences around each yard, few cars in the driveways. I counted the house numbers. I couldn't think why Rebecca would want to live in a neighborhood like that. Surely the prison was paying her well enough to get an apartment someplace nice. She appeared to be a woman of means—her clothes were fashionable and looked expensive. But even if she dressed in rags, it would have been clear that Rebecca was not a poor woman. You can see wealth in people no matter what they're wearing. It's in the cut of their chins, a certain gloss to the skin, a drag and pause to their responsiveness. When poor people hear a loud noise, they whip their heads around. Wealthy people finish their sentences, then just glance back. Rebecca was wealthy, and I knew it. That she lived in X-ville at all seemed strange. I'd expected she would have preferred to live somewhere more central, Boston or Cambridge, where there were intelligent and sophisticated young people, and art, things to do. Perhaps she hated the long commute. Anyway, what did I
know? Perhaps Rebecca wasn't a snob, and I was wrong to expect her to want to live so comfortably. Rolling down her block, I told myself the street did indeed have a dark charm to it. And I figured it took courage and a big heart for a rich woman like Rebecca to live amongst people who worked in factories and gas stations and on fishing boats, or not at all. I imagined the neighborhood was the place my father had done his best work, beating up teenagers, busting into houses full of drunken yelling, a room full of crying children, men with long hair, and fleshy, wrinkly women with rotted teeth and tattoos, wearing only underwear.

And then I found Rebecca's house, a dark brown two-story home with white trim and a decrepit plant frozen at the top of the front steps. It was slightly less pathetic than the other houses on the block, at least. There were lights on in every window, music on inside loud enough that I could hear it from out in the car. I parked, rolled up my window, primped in the rearview mirror, and got out with my wine. Here my memory breaks down like a film in slow motion. I unlatched the gate and stepped into the yard. My black snow boots found a narrow path hastily cleared of snow, still icy. I walked carefully, not wanting to slip and fall and break the wine or look foolish. I was nervous. It had been a long time since I'd gone any place I wanted to be. Up the steps I saw a shadow move behind yellow curtains. I held the screen with my hip and knocked on the painted plywood door, which swung open as soon as I touched it.

“You made it!”

There she was. My Rebecca. She held in her arms a dirty
white cat which clawed at her loose hair, then looked at me and hissed. “Never mind her, him,” she said. “It's upset because its owner has been a little hysterical all day.”

“Hi,” I said, awkwardly. “Merry Christmas.”

“You know I nearly forgot it was Christmas? Come on in,” she said.

Rebecca dropped the cat with a heavy thud on the worn wood floor and it slunk away, hissing some more. She seemed agitated, too, Rebecca did, from the get-go. I felt like I might be intruding. I looked for a place to put down my things. The front hall had narrow, chipping maroon walls. An ugly metal railing led up the carpeted staircase which was particularly dirty, stray strands of the rug hanging off where the cat had pawed it.