Fucking Daphne (5 page)

I just need to see her,
I thought.
We just need to talk.

Daphne wouldn't see me when I drove upstate to talk it through. I banged on her door until finally her mother came down to say that she didn't want to see me. I felt horrible for waking her mother up; I knew
how early she needed to go to work in the mornings. I got in my car and drove home, sobbing quietly.

Eventually, I started eating again and Daphne moved. I've heard she's moved a few times, graduated, moved again, and then moved across the country.

It's been over ten years. I've moved, too, finished school and moved again. I think she'll find me when she's ready. I will always be ready for her. I think someday she'll be ready for me.

 

 

T
he first time I saw the poet, she was smoking outside Mills Hall.

The rumor: She'd had both lungs removed and still hadn't quit. She could breathe without lungs, that one. She could smoke. She inhaled the dense gray air right into her rib cage; it gathered around her four-chambered heart like coastal fog.

I was living on campus at the time, in an apartment that reminded everyone of a boat. They said it had something to do with the orange light in the little porthole of a window. I never understood what it was about that orange light or that little window that seemed boatlike, but when more than a few different people from more than a few different places all tell you the same thing, you've pretty well got to believe them. Either believe them or float off into some other psychic space entirely, drop anchor, and start imitating the natives.

I had no intention of moving.

“I've got a class tonight,” I told my daughter, as she slurped her dinner of Top Ramen and diced zucchini. “Do you wanna come with me or stay with Bella and the kids?”

She scrunched up her sunburned face into a jack-o'-lantern smile. “Bella kids!” And she dropped her fork, ran for her room. When she toddled back out, she'd thrown a sailor dress on over her diaper.

I made her hold my hand as we crossed the driveway, but then she broke away. She burst into Bella's apartment without knocking, was absorbed into the squealing mass of kid energy and Lego world.

I poked my head around the door frame, apologizing for her enthusiasm.

Bella smiled, gap-toothed. At age forty-five, and under circumstances that I gathered had something to do with criminal court, Bella had wound up with full-time custody of her sister's three children.

“I came back to school for the subsidized housing,” she'd told me.

She wore a red scarf over her braids, studied biology. “You ready for your big
class
then, missy?” She winked at me.

I nodded and kissed my daughter on the cheek, but she didn't look up from her Lego ranch that had already expanded across the living room carpet. “Bye, baby,” I whispered. And I was out. I headed down the hill for the first meeting of my evening class, clutching my story draft like a newborn.

See, I was a twenty-one-year-old welfare mom undergrad, feeling extra special since I'd been accepted into the graduate writing seminar. You had to get instructor approval, and I'd wowed
that hippie adjunct with a surrealist birth narrative. I planned to present the same story that night in the workshop.
The grad students will never believe I'm only a sophomore
.

As I stepped over the threshold into the little classroom, I thought,
My life as a writer begins now.

I recognized the lungless poet right away. She had a goofy face and buck teeth. I took the seat next to her but tried not to make eye contact. I'd been finding out little things about her, sort of secretly, since that first time I'd seen her. Just asking around, really; doing some research. A grad student. She rented porn videos on East 14th Street next to the food stamps office. She collected dead bugs, pinned them to silk, and etched their Latin names in black Sharpie.

The other grad students trickled in, chattering absent summer hellos. They were old, some of them, maybe thirty or even forty.

I wondered if they knew I didn't belong.

At last the instructor floated in.

I belong because she said I belonged.
I smiled up at her.

“For those of you who don't know me yet—you may call me Demeter,” she announced. She pretended not to notice me, but I knew: She was looking forward to the other girls hearing my narrative. Women, actually. At Mills, we called each other “women.”

One by one, they read their stories. Their phrases flowed like rivers, but I couldn't seem to follow their course. They complimented each other on metaphors and meaning.

I wanted a cigarette.

Instead, I sat there mute and jonesing.

“Ariel? Did you bring something to share?” Demeter finally asked.

“Um. Yes?”

My hands shook as I read. I sucked my words from the paper and spat them out, a story of forcing life from life under fluorescent hospital lights. I set the pages down in front of me, triumphant-scared.

Silence.

I looked out the window, but it had gotten dark. My tree view had been replaced by the reflection of the poet's hip.

“I'm so fucking glad I got an abortion,” someone finally blurted. “Birth is so . . . ” She bit her lip. “
Seventies.”

“Now, Diane,” the instructor smirked. “You are being very bad.” Demeter turned to me. The yellow barrette in her gray hair was shaped like a lily. “Your descriptions are vivid, Ariel, but what I think Diane is responding to is the lack of conflict in your piece.”

I never wanted her to be born,
I thought.
She was safe inside me.

“It's lack of
context
, really,” another woman piped up. “Don't you think? I mean, why should we care about this? Babies are born every day.”

Care,
I thought.
Why?

The buck-toothed poet didn't come to my defense, exactly, but when it was all over and the women gathered their notebooks and swished their skirts and continued conversations I imagined they'd begun a year earlier, she leaned over and whispered sultrily in my ear: “I think the world of your work.”

I guess I've always been a sucker for flattery.

The other girls at Mills never knew quite what to make of me. I brought my daughter to morning classes, breastfed during lectures. I stole food from the dining halls. I annoyed them, but they didn't have the nerve to call me on my shit. In PC feminist identity
politics, teenage welfare mother trumps whatever you've got. They calculated, mentally, the cost of each tuna sandwich I pocketed, then invited the two of us to their tea parties to show us off as tokens of their diversity.

I walked back up the hill in the dark.

To move alone at night, even after just a few years of maternal captivity, is something magical. The warm wind reminded me of missed adolescent curfews.

Earthquake weather
.

I thought about the baby. Two years old, and she was suddenly and completely not a baby at all. “I'm a big girl,” she reminded me each morning.

I could die
, I thought.
I could die and she would live
.

The kids were all asleep in the bunk beds when I got back. I peered in, watched them in the glow of a Snoopy night-light. I focused on my daughter's chest, watching it rise and fall a few times just to assure myself that she was still alive.

“So, how was it?” Bella wanted to know. It was late, but she poured me a cup of coffee. We hardly ever slept, Bella and I. We went to class in the mornings, took care of the kids, wrote our papers at night.

“It was okay,” I told her. “Do you know that poet girl?”

“Poet woman?”

“Yeah. Poet woman.”

“The one without lungs?”

“Yeah.”

“What about her?”

“I think she likes me.”

Bella clucked her tongue, shook her head, sipped her own coffee. “You be careful,” she said. “I don't know much about your poet woman, but, you gotta know by now, these rich bitches are
interested
in you. They don't
like
you. Do you understand the difference?”

I nodded, even though I didn't. “She isn't rich,” I offered. “I mean, she's a grad student. She lives in the city. I looked her up in the registrar's office during work-study.”

Bella frowned. “You looked up her address?”

I nodded. “And her financial aid package.” The coffee tasted like blood.

Bella shook her head real slow.

I wanted to leave. “Do you think it would be all right if I left my girl here tonight? Just, you know, so I don't wake her up trying to move her?”

“Sure,” Bella said. “She's always welcome here.”

I waited in my apartment until Bella had turned off her kitchen light, her bedroom lamp. Then I crept out to the parking lot. Bella kept the keys to her old Dodge Dart right in the ignition. I slid into the driver's seat, rolled down the hill before I started the thing up, and roared out the security gate and onto the freeway. From the east side of the Bay Bridge, the lights of San Francisco looked like a movie set.

I exited at Army Street, pulled into the gas station to put some air in Bella's tires. It was 2:00 AM when I finally knocked on the door of the poet's Mission District apartment.

Her roommate answered, sleepy-eyed, her hair a purple and blond tangle of failed style. She looked me up and down as sweetly as anyone can look you up and down, tightening the torn silk robe
around her thin frame. “Oh, honey,” she sighed, “you just missed her. She went out for cigarettes.”

My heart swelled. You've gotta love a girl who goes out for cigarettes at 2:00 AM.

Even Mark Twain could wait until dawn for a cigarette.

“Thanks,” I blushed. “I'll just maybe wait in my car a little while and see if she comes back?”

The roommate shrugged as she closed the door. “Sometimes she comes back and sometimes she doesn't.”

In the car I listened to a mix tape on the passenger's-seat boom box—Indigo Girls and Sarah McLachlan and Sweet Honey in the Rock and whatnot. Mills women only listened to music like that. I watched for bodies moving through the night, but just a few gangster boys passed under the streetlights, with their baggy pants and wife-beater tanks, their 24th Street swagger.

Ani DiFranco sang “Both Hands” from the passenger's seat.

I had to get home.

When Ani was finished, I started the car.

A neon sign outside the evangelical church two blocks from campus glowed red: I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD.

The words seared themselves into my mind, made my soul feel expansive. What if I
was
the light of the world? Imagine.

I hated myself.

I rolled down my window as I pulled onto campus, winked at the guard in the security hut.

I tiptoed back into my little houseboat of an apartment, even though there was no one to wake. I heaped my clothes on the floor, collapsed onto my mattress.

I must have fallen asleep fast, because the next thing I knew, her hands were wrapped around my tits. She was behind me, but I recognized her silver rings.

I had to arch my back to get a look at her. “You followed me home?”

She laughed.

“Squeeze them harder.”

When my breast milk jetted in two perfect arcs across the bed, she squealed like a valley girl. “Ohmygod that'ssocrazy!”

I sat up. “Do you want to taste it?”

She licked her lips. “I don't know.”

I couldn't tell if she was being coy or what, so I grabbed the fuller breast, squirted the milk for her mouth.

She opened wide, then snapped her lips shut, surprised. “It's bitter.”

There was a strange light coming from the window. I thought I could hear the ocean. I rolled onto my belly, listened to the water sounds lapping. Her hand rested at my waist. “Will you fuck me?” I asked.

She outlined the koi fish tattoo on my back with her tongue. “Maybe,” she whispered.

My apartment rocked back and forth, that orange light flickering in the porthole. I heard a voice from outside—the graduate seminar instructor?—crying ocean sounds, “The dream is the truth.” I was afraid for her, rushed from my room and to the door, but when I opened it there was just water. Water everywhere. I had to get back to my baby, but I couldn't see Bella's apartment from my porch. Just water. Dark night of stormy tide. I fell back into my
room through the dream, called out to the poet, but she was gone now, too.