My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead (75 page)

I paced around our tiny room. It didn’t even occur to me to go outside; I had no idea how to navigate the city without her. There was only one thing I couldn’t do when she was with me, so after a while, I lay down on the couch and did this. I closed my eyes. In all the well-worn memories, we were between the ages of six and eight. We were under the covers on her mom’s foldout sofa, or on the top bunk of my bunk bed, or in a tent in her backyard. Every location was potent in its own way. No matter where we were, it began when Pip whispered, Let’s mate. She scooted on top of me; we clamped our arms around each other’s backs. We rubbed ourselves against each other’s small hip bones, trying to achieve friction. When we did it right, the feeling came on like a head rush of the whole body.

But just before I got there, I noticed a clicking noise in the air. It was distractingly present, quietly insistent. I looked up. Above my head, our five Chinese paper lanterns were slightly rocking of their own accord. As I reached toward them, I suddenly realized why, but I was too late to stop myself. I shook a lantern, and from the hole in the bottom, cockroaches came pouring out. They were crawling even as they fell. They were planning the conquest of wherever they landed even before they touched down. And when they hit the ground, they didn’t die, they didn’t even think of dying. They ran.

When Pip finally came home, we agreed that the Leanne job was not worth the money. But a few days later, we saw Nastassja Kinski in the movie
Paris, Texas
. She was wearing a long red sweater and working in a peep show. I thought it looked like a pretty easy job, as long as Harry Dean Stanton didn’t show up, but Pip didn’t agree.

No way. I’m not gonna do that.

I could do it without you.

This made her so angry that she did the dishes. We never did this unless we were trying to be grand and self-destructive. I stood in the doorway and tried to maintain my end of our silence while watching her scratch at calcified noodles. In truth, I had not yet learned how to hate anyone but my parents. I was actually just standing there in love. I was not even really standing; if she had walked away suddenly, I would have fallen.

I won’t do it, never mind.

You sound disappointed.

I’m not.

It’s okay; I know you want them to look at you.

Who?

Men.

No, I don’t.

If you do that, then I can’t be with you anymore.

This was, in a way, the most romantic thing she had ever said to me. It implied that we were living together not because we had grown up together and were the only people we knew, but because of something else. Because we both didn’t want men to look at me. I told her I would never work in a peep show, and she stopped doing the dishes, which meant she meant she was okay again. But I wasn’t okay. In the last ten years, we had touched only three times.

1. When she was eleven, her uncle tried to molest her. When she told me about it, I cried and she hit me on the chin and I curled up in a ball for forty minutes until she uncurled me. I kept my eyes shut as she pulled my knees away from my chest and I could feel her looking at my body and I knew that if I kept my eyes closed it would happen and it did. She slid her hand under my tights and felt around until she had located the thing she knew on herself. Then she shook her finger in a violent, animal way that quickly gave me the old rush. When it was over, she told me not to tell anyone and I didn’t know if she meant this, with me, or about her uncle.

2. When we were fourteen we got drunk for the first time, and for about nine minutes, everything seemed possible and we kissed. This encounter seemed promisingly normal, and in the following days I waited for more kissing, perhaps even some kind of exchange of rings or lockets. But nothing was exchanged. We each kept our own things.

3. In our last year of high school, I momentarily had one other friend. She was an ordinary girl, her name was Tammy, she liked the Smiths. There was no way I could ever be in love with her because she was just as pathetic as me. Every day she told me everything she was thinking, and I guessed that this was what most girls did together. I wanted to talk about myself, too, badly, but it was hard to know where to begin. She was always so far ahead of me, in the minutiae of poems she had written in reference to dreams she had dreamed. So I just hung out, in a loose imitation of Pip. Pip did not think much of Tammy, but she was mildly intrigued by the normalcy of the friendship.

What do you guys do?

Nothing. Listen to tapes and stuff.

That’s it?

Last weekend we made peanut-butter cookies.

Oh. That sounds fun.

Are you being sarcastic?

No, it does.

So she came along the next time I went over to Tammy’s house. This made me a little nervous because Tammy had these parents who were always around. Traditionally, parents did not know what to make of Pip, who looked much more like a boy than a girl, and somehow made mothers feel flirtatious and fathers feel strangely threatened. But Tammy’s parents were watching a movie and just waved absently behind their heads when we came in. As predicted, we listened to tapes. Pip asked if we were going to make peanut-butter cookies, but Tammy said she didn’t have the right stuff. Then she threw herself down on the bed and asked us if we were girlfriends or what? An appalling emptiness filled the room. I stared out the window and repeated the word “window” in my head, I was ready to
window window window
indefinitely, but suddenly, Pip answered.

Yeah.

Cool. I have a gay cousin.

Tammy told us that her room was a safe space and we didn’t have to pretend, and then she showed us a neon pink sticker that her cousin had sent her. It said fuck your gender. We all looked at the sticker in silence, absorbing its two meanings—at
least
two, probably even more. Tammy seemed to be waiting for something, as if Pip and I would obediently fall upon each other the moment we read the sticker’s bold command. I knew we were a disappointment, meekly sitting on the bed. Pip must have felt this, too, because she abruptly threw her arm over my shoulder. This had never happened before, so understandably, I froze. And then very gradually recalibrated my body into a casual attitude. Pip just blinked when I sighed and flopped my hand on her thigh. Tammy watched all of this and even gave a slight nod of approval before shifting her attention back to the music. We listened to the Smiths, the Velvet Underground, and the Sugarcubes. Pip and I did not move from our position. After an hour and twenty minutes, my back ached and my numb blue hand felt unaffiliated with the rest of my body. I politely excused myself.

In the powdery warmth of the bathroom I felt euphoric. Being alone suddenly felt wild. I locked the door and made a series of involuntary, baroque gestures in the mirror. I waved maniacally at myself and contorted my face into hideous, unlovable expressions. I washed my hands as if they were children, cradling one and then the other. I was experiencing a paroxysm of selfhood. The scientific name for this spasm is the Last Hurrah. The feeling was quickly spent. I dried my hands on a tiny blue towel and walked back to the bedroom.

I knew it the moment before I saw it. I knew I would find them together on the bed like this, I knew I would be stunned, I knew they would spring apart and wipe their mouths. Pip would not look me in the eye. I would never talk to Tammy again. I knew we would all graduate from high school, I knew that Pip and I would live together as planned. And I knew she did not want me in that way. She never would. Other girls, any girl, but not me.

Now that we had paid the rent, we felt entitled to mention the cockroach situation to the landlord. He said he would send someone over but that we shouldn’t get our hopes up.

Why not?

Well, it’s not just your apartment; the whole building’s infested.

Maybe you should have them do the whole building, then.

It wouldn’t do any good; they’d just come over from other buildings.

It’s the whole block?

It’s the whole world.

I told him never mind then and got off the phone quickly, before he could hear Pip hammering. We were making some renovations; specifically, we were building a basement. Our apartment was tiny, but the ceilings were tall, and there was a tantalizing amount of unused space above our heads. Pip thought lofts were for hippies, so even though our studio was on the second floor, she had sketched out a design that would allow us to live on a low-ceilinged main floor, and then, when feeling morose, descend a ladder to the basement. We would leave the heavy things down there, like the refrigerator and bathtub, but everything else would come upstairs. We could both picture the basement perfectly in our heads. It had a damp, mineral smell. Warmth and seams of light seeped through the ceiling. Up there was home. Dinner waited for us up there.

One of the many great reasons for building a basement was our access to free wood. Pip had met a girl whose father owned Berryman’s Lumber and Supply. Kate Berryman. She was a year younger than us and went to the private high school by Pip’s grandma’s house. I had never met her, but I felt glad that we were using her. We practiced a very loose, sporadic form of class warfare that sanctioned every kind of thievery. There was no person, no business, no library, hospital, or park that had not stolen from us, be it psychically or historically, and thus we were forever trying to regain what was ours. Kate probably thought she was on our side of the restitution when she struggled to pull large pieces of plywood out of the back of her parents’ station wagon. She left them in the alley behind our building, honking three times as she drove away. At her signal, we strolled out of the building, pretending to take a walk, sometimes even stopping to buy a soda, before arbitrarily, on a whim, deciding to amble down the alley. We hauled it upstairs, feeling fairly certain we had hoodwinked everyone. We were always getting away with something, which implied that someone was always watching us, which meant we were not alone in this world.

Each morning Pip made a list of what we needed to do that day. At the top of the list was usually
go to bank
, where they had free coffee. The next items were often vague—
find out about food stamps, library card?
—but the list still gave me a cozy feeling. I liked to watch her write it, knowing that someone was steering the day. At night we discussed how we would decorate the basement, but during the day our progress was slow. Mostly, what we had was a lot of pieces of wood; they leaned against the walls and lay across the couch like untrained dogs.

We were trying to nail a post into the linoleum kitchen floor when Pip decided we needed a certain kind of bracket.

Are you sure?

Yeah. I’ll call Kate and she’ll bring it.

Isn’t she in school?

It’s okay.

Pip made the call and then went to take a shower. I continued hammering long nails through the post and into the floor. The post became secure. It was a satisfying feeling. It wouldn’t withstand any kind of weight, but it stood on its own. It was almost as tall as me, and I could not help naming it. It looked like a Gwen.

The buzzer rang, and Pip ran damply to the door. It was Kate. I looked up at her from where I was sitting on the kitchen floor. She was wearing a school uniform. She was not holding the brackets. Maybe she had hidden them up her skirt.

Where are the brackets? I asked.

With panic in her eyes, Kate looked at Pip. Pip took her hand, turned to me, and said, We have to tell you something.

I suddenly felt chilled. My ears felt so cold that I had to press my hands against them. But I quickly realized this made me look as if I were covering them to avoid listening, like the monkey who hears no evil. So I rubbed my palms together and asked, Are your ears cold? Pip didn’t respond, but Kate shook her head.

Okay, go ahead.

Kate and I are going to live together at her parents’ house.

Why?

What do you mean?

Well, I’m sure Kate’s dad doesn’t want you living in his house after you stole all that stuff from him.

I’m going to work at Berryman’s Lumber to pay him back. I might even make enough money to get a car.