Leaving the Comfort Cafe (27 page)

“You and Dr. Strangelove.” Roach blows a steady stream of smoke up her cheek. The right side of her lips turns slightly upward, and the smoke makes her look like a snarling dragon. The ash on her cigarette needs to be dumped, but it remains there, clinging to something warm and burning. It’s going to fall off and set fire to something. I know it. She’s going to get it too close to someone’s gas tank, and we’re both just going to crack, burn and fizz.

“What about me and Dr.Yates?”

“You’re obsessed with him. You know, you two can’t be an item. Research ethics and all that,” she says.

“There is no item.”

“Isn’t he shacked up with some British chick now?”

“They’re not shacked up.” My cheek burns. I’m surprised it makes me angry that he has a girlfriend.

“Wasn’t she supposed to go back across the pond after she finished teaching last semester as a part of that exchange or whatever?”

“Look, I can’t go to New York. I don’t even have a bag packed.”

“Taken care of.” She shoves another Target bag in my hand. “Undies, toothbrush, everything you need.”

“Why didn’t you give me a chance to pack my own things?”

“Because you’d never do it. Just like you’d never read your poetry on open mike night, just like you’d never take guitar lessons, just like you’d never bite the bullet and just buy a house instead of renting…just like you’d never make a move on your man, Dr. Strangelove.”

But I did make a move on my man. I can’t tell her, because she’d laugh. “Dr. Strangelove is not my man.”

“I know. That’s the problem.”

“And stop calling him Dr. Strangelove.” I look at the Dramamine package. The words seem to have a different hue than the kind I usually take. More green? “I can’t take this.”

“What do you mean you can’t take this? You take it all the time.”

“I need the non-drowsy formula. I can’t take this. I’ll sleep for four days.”

“Geez…” Rochelle snatches it out of my hand and starts fumbling through her pocketbook, looking for the receipt, I’m assuming. “How can anyone have motion sickness? I mean, how can you be sick of moving? Everything’s moving. Hell, the earth moves at gazillion miles a minute or something like that.” She finds the receipt and pulls me by the elbow. “If I’m going back in, you’re going back with me.”

“But I’m—”

“I know, I know, the colors, so many colors…” She makes air quotes over the word “colors.” She still doesn’t believe me. What does she think I go to Duke for twice a week? She takes my arm and pulls me up to the front door like a reluctant prom date.

Inside, it’s like the Wizard of Oz dropped Technicolor acid with one of Elton John’s 1970 concert costumes. Everywhere, the colors dance and jump and mumble to the point that it almost makes an audible noise, singing to me, a low hum urging me forward to Dollar Days—lots of dark lime and violet in that one. I recognize words not just by the letter, but by the color. The same color they’ve had since I was three, the same at twenty-three…and Dr. Yates says, the same when I’m eighty-three, if I live that long. Eighty-three: the softer version of my seven and blue. Or sometimes, the numbers are so close together that the two different colors look like one.

No one understands how the world could hold that much endless variety, and yet, it does.

David Yates says he thinks he can condition me to where I can go into large discount stores again. To where the barrage of colors doesn’t cause my brain to spark into a dosage of sensory overload and cause a migraine. Throughout college, it wasn’t too bad; the headache of going to places crammed with products was similar to the eye strain I got from reading too much or staring at the computer screen all day. Gradually, it got worse. I had a panic attack once in a Sam’s club and blacked out. That’s when Rochelle started helping me run errands.

That was the second time I met her. She was at Sam’s Club getting dog food in bulk to feed her rescued canine multitudes, and she came upon me passed out on the floor, all sprawled out. It was the first time I had actually fainted somewhere. I don’t know what it was that triggered it. Maybe, like high tide, it just gradually built up and built up until I didn’t realize I was in over my head. Next thing I knew, I was staring up at the ceiling, with Rochelle leaning over me shouting, “Give her room! Give her room!” And everyone thought she was a nurse because her voice sounded so authoritative, like she knew what she was doing. I had been carrying a bottle of Merlot up to the counter when I fell, and it had shattered around me. I had felt something wet on my arm and looked down, and there was this huge red stain running across the sleeve of my blouse. Of course, I thought it was blood, and Rochelle evidently did, too; she started grabbing at my arm to see the source of the injury—with no thought of putting on rubber gloves or anything to protect herself from any blood-borne pathogens.

“Hey, you’re the chick from the animal blessing,” she said as she helped me up and took me to the emergency room, where she calmed the triage nurse by declaring, “It’s only Merlot.” She stayed with me until after I had an MRI and checked out okay.

There’s something humbling about being helped by a stranger; unworthiness and gratefulness mix together. At first, because my initial encounter with Rochelle was at church, I thought she was an overly devout Good Samaritan. But now I realize, she saw me the same way she sees her rescue mutts—a drowning animal, dazed and confused, that needs her help. Once I was her “rescue,” we were bound together. For better or worse.

Fzzt! Fzzt! Rochelle is lighting up again. In the pharmacy section of Target. She sticks the cigarette in the corner of her mouth and fishes into her tattered denim purse. She places the receipt it on the counter. Its numbers and letters flicker primarily of purple, gold and green. Mardi Gras colors. The party before Lent. There’s no clerk at the counter, and Rochelle raps on the counter and cranes her neck to see if someone has stepped behind the shelves of Zoloft, Zantac and Xanax.

“You can’t take the cigarettes on the plane.” I remind her.

“They don’t ask for ID at these private airports do they? You know I don’t have a license.”

“You what? But you drove me—”

“I didn’t say I couldn’t drive. I just said I didn’t have a license.”

“How have you lived without a license?”

“I manage,” she mutters. “Got to stay off the grid. That’s how they get you. Social Security and license numbers and IRS junk…and yes, I can take the cigarettes on the plane, I just can’t smoke them on the plane,” she says defiantly. “Do you think some nut job security guard is going to give me a strip search?”

“They don’t do that now. They do it all by computer. It’s all James Bond now.”

“Oh come on…you mean like…” She goes up to one of the remote price check scanners and rubs her bottom against it.

“Stop that. You’re embarrassing me. Why don’t you act your age?”

“It’s New Year’s Eve. We’re at Target exchanging Dramamine, and you’re embarrassed?”

“Well, if they don’t scan you, they’ll pat you down. Or something.”

She doesn’t believe me. “Not at a private airport. We’re flying private.” More flicking with the lighter. Zzzzpt. Pop. “If you really want to go in class, you fly private.”

“How did you pull that off?”

“A friend of mine owes me a favor. We see Tad while we’re up there.”

“You still hung up on him?”

“He’s got a dog I got to pick up. The rehabilitation thing, you know.”

For a moment, I’m not sure if she’s talking about Tad or the dog.

“Hey!” Rochelle barks past the cash register to no one in particular.

“Maybe they haven’t opened yet.”

“Need some service!”

“Actually, I think we’re supposed to exchange it at the customer service desk.”

Rochelle tilts her weight onto her heels and glares at me, one eyebrow slightly raised. “Oh no. We don’t do customer service desks. They ask you fill out forms with your address, phone number, et cetera. Then you’re on the grid.”

“For the love of God.” I know she means well. I know she sees me as her personal project. I know she thinks I need saving. She’s like a lifeguard who never learned how to swim. I take the Dramamine, put it back on the shelf, take the non-drowsy formula and stuff it into the bag. “They’re the same price. Let’s just go.” My head is starting to throb. I rub my temples.

“You about to throw a fit? All the colors?”

Again with the air quotes.

“Just—just—let’s go…”

We leave the pharmacy section and head toward the door. At the front, a sales clerk who has just opened her register is casting a suspicious glare in our direction. I can’t tell if she’s annoyed by Rochelle’s secondhand smoke, or if she’s been secretly following us on some kind of undercover camera that was activated when Rochelle price-scanned her butt. I can’t take my eyes off of her. The clerk looks like she’s about 16 years old and she has these gorgeous, long, African braids that spiral around her forehead and cascade over her shoulders like some type of royal veil. There’s one strand that is this electric blue, and it weaves from behind her left ear to midway down her back. One of her braids falls down the front of her left shoulder stopping just short of her name tag. My name is Wendy. She’s got a purple Blackberry sitting beside her at the cash register, as if we had interrupted her text messaging. Her eyes dart back and forth, as if she were waiting for someone to get back from the bathroom so she could return to her usual post. She doesn’t realize that the color in her braid perfectly complements the colors in her name.

I want to tell her that. But I can’t.

She’d never believe me.

By

Dawn DeAnna Wilson

Chapter 1

There’s an art to going crazy.

People think that it hits you all at once, but it doesn’t. Like regret, it builds up over time, until it drags you out to sea. You make a splash for a while, but eventually, people forget about you. Then pretty soon, you forget who you are, or even if you had ever been.

November was not the time to see Brick House.

The empty, clutching trees and gray sky formed a perfect frame for its aching walls and chipping paint. The front porch was like the crooked back of a junkyard dog. The windows were dingy from lack of activity. The porch swing, broken.

Home for the leftovers. Some way to spend senior year.

It wasn’t even made of bricks. I don’t know why everyone calls it Brick House, unless it’s loneliness. Bricks are lonely. They sound like they ought to be lonely, anyway.

Mom shifted uneasily. It was her idea. We’d grown hoarse from shouting until it became too painful to even speak. So we stopped. It was just as simple as turning off the lights. Something had snapped, and we both knew better than to try to fix it.

Of course, Mom had the upper hand because I didn’t have my guitar. I was naked without it, and the fingers of my right hand imagined the grooves of the case handle. Mom wouldn’t let me bring the guitar until she was sure there was a place where I could keep it locked up. No telling what might happen to it, she said. After all, she had paid two hundred dollars for the thing. It would senseless for it to be stolen or damaged.

The porch boards creaked beneath my weight. Mom managed to pack all my things in two suitcases. She had the small one, and I carried the other one, letting the blue vinyl handle etch a design into the crook of my fingers.

She pressed the doorbell, but instead of ringing, it made an awkward clank, as if something in its very core was broken beyond repair. A small, bent lady with gray hair tied tightly in a bun answered the door.

“Taylor Drysdale.” Mom cleared her throat. We’ve brought her stuff, I mean, we’re here to settle in.”

Her voice had an odd ring to the words, “settle in.” The words floated to my stomach and burned.

“Come in.” The lady opened the door wide—too wide—like an overly-anxious host who doesn’t get too many guests.

Inside, a Tar Heel beanbag fought gaudy furniture for attention. There was an impressive widescreen TV with bits of popcorn decorating the dark brown carpet in front of it.

Everything in the room looked as if it were found at a yard sale; things that someone else didn’t want. The couch had an ugly orange, blue and yellow afghan across it that must have been made by a colorblind grandma. The ends of it weren’t tied very well, and it was starting to unravel.

“I’ll get Mr. Hopkins. He’ll be with you in a minute. Please have a seat.” With that, the lady trotted out of the room, gleefully, like she was heading to take some cookies out of the oven.

I didn’t want to sit on anything because it looked broken. I was afraid I’d get contaminated, and then who’d fix me?

There was a cuckoo clock that fascinated me until I realized that it was a fake. It looked like a real cuckoo, but if you watched it carefully, you’d see that it was made of plastic. The bird in the center was impaled on a stick. It didn’t pop out; it just bobbed its head back and forth in a hypnotic dance.

“You need to sit down. You look tired,” Mother told me.

I couldn’t tell her that if you touched anything in this house you would become broken, too.

“Taylor, sit down.”

“I can’t. I’ll get broken, just like the furniture.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “That’s only your Condition talking.”

She always referred to it as my “Condition” with a capital “C.” Made me sound like I was having my period. “Parent’s note: Taylor can’t run in P.E. today because she has her Condition.”

“Well, where are all the people?” I asked. “If this place is so great, then where the hell are the people? Locked up in some room, somewhere.”

“Taylor, don’t swear.”

“But where are they?”

“They?” A deep baritone voice called from the stairs. “They are all in a group therapy session. You must be Taylor. We’ve been expecting you.”

To say that he was bald would be an understatement. He jumbled down the steps like a rag doll in a suit and tie. He came to me with an outstretched hand. Instead of shaking his hand, I thumbed through a hymnal that was on the coffee table. I found that “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” had been ripped out of its place and stuck in the middle like an odd bookmark. I missed my guitar. Mom promised she’d bring it later this week.