The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (4 page)

“Well,” I said.

“Just like I do thousands of things for you. I mean, you know that I do things for you because I care about you and because I want to, not because I feel like I have to or because I want you to owe me anything. So you don’t have to say, ‘Thank you, Cinder, for letting me come live with you when I had no place else to go…Thank you, Cinder, for dragging me around with you everywhere and introducing me to all your friends.’ I know you feel gratitude toward me, just like I feel gratitude toward you. But that’s not the point.”

“Well, I know,” I said. What point? “But still.”

“And anyhow,” she said, “I did ask you to get that guy out of the apartment, but I didn’t ask you to spend the rest of your life with him. What did you do, anyhow?”

“We had dinner,” I said.

“Dinner! How hilarious!”

“I don’t see why,” I said. “People eat dinner every night. Besides, I had to do something with him. And then”—oh, so what, I thought—“we went dancing.”

“Oh, unbelievable!” Cinder said. “I can just see it. One of those places full of little Latino girls in pressed jeans and heels, boys covered with jewelry…”

“That’s—” I said. “That’s—” I tried to seize the sensation that rippled under my hand, of gold against Hector’s skin as he drank his Coke and laughed with the girl, but the sensation dried, leaving me with only the empty image.

“One of those places where everyone does this super-structured dancing, one of those places with putrid airwave rock…” Cinder said.

“One of those places where everyone’s bilingual,” I said. “Besides, you were going to go out with him yourself.”

“Go out with him, yeah, but not, like, necessarily into public. I mean, God, Charlie—Charlotte—you were so nice to him!”

“Actually,” I said, and a thought froze me where I stood, “he was nice to me.” I looked at Cinder in horror, seeing the distress on Hector’s face as I’d shut the door against him and the roomful of dancers. “He was nice to me, and I just left him there.”

“Well,” Cinder said. “He’ll live.”

“I might have hurt his feelings,” I said. “It was a mean thing to do.”

“Well, it wasn’t really mean,” Cinder said. “Besides, you’re right. It was me he asked out, not you.”

My brain started to revolve inside my skull, tumbling its inventory. “I’m going to call him and apologize,” I said, rummaging through my pocket for the piece of paper with his number on it.

“God,” Cinder said, looking at me. “He gave you his number?”

“To tell you the truth—” I said. And then I couldn’t say anything else for several seconds. “He gave me his number for you. He wanted you to call him.”

“Charlotte,” Cinder said, rolling over. “You liked him.”

“He’s a perfectly nice man,” I snapped. “I neither liked nor disliked him.”

“Man?” Cinder said. “He’s probably just barely gone through some puberty rite where he had to spear a sow or something.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “He’s studying computer engineering. And you know what, Cinder? You’re a racist—”

“Racist!” she said. “Now, where is
that
coming from?”

“That’s right,” I said, “you think you can say these idiotic things about him because he’s a Puerto Rican. You don’t take him seriously because he’s a Puerto Rican—”

“It is not because he’s a Puerto Rican!” she said.

“Not because he’s a Puerto Rican,” Mitchell echoed, and Cinder and I swiveled at the sound of his voice. “Not because he’s a Puerto Rican. Because he’s
like
a Puerto Rican. He’s a Cuban.”

“Cuban!” Cinder and I said in unison.

“At least, that’s what he told me,” Mitchell said. “When we were waiting for Cinder.” Mitchell’s eyes moved from Cinder to me and back again while we stared at him. His face looked white and slippery, like a bathroom tile. “Hector,” he said finally. “You mean the guy who was here before. The Cuban.”

“The Cuban!” Cinder whooped. “That’s right—the Cuban, Charlie! Who’s the racist now, huh?”

“Why don’t you get off the floor?” I said. “You’re getting stuff all over that dress.”

“Come on, Charlotte,” Cinder said, but she stood up, and for an instant she looked terribly uncertain. “I really don’t see why you’re getting so crazy about this. This is just
funny.
”

Funny, I thought. It was funny.

But it wasn’t that funny. “There isn’t a thing wrong with that dress, is there?” I said. “Besides—” I took a breath. “Hector didn’t think I looked like a dinosaur skeleton—”

“Dinosaur skeleton?” Cinder said. “What on earth are you talking about, Charlotte? Why would anybody think you look like a dinosaur skeleton? I really don’t know what your problem is. You act like everyone’s trying to kill you. You sit there with your mouth open and your finger in your nose like you don’t know anything and you can’t understand anything and you can’t do anything and you want me to tell you what’s going on all the time. But that’s not what you want at all. You don’t really care what I think. You don’t care what Mitchell thinks. You just like to make people think you’re completely pathetic, and then everyone feels absolutely horrible so you don’t really have to pay any attention to anybody. You’re like one of those things that hang upside down from trees pretending to be dead so no one will shoot it! You’re an awful friend!”

I stared at Cinder.

Good heavens, yes.

But it was too late for me to do anything about being a bad friend. I stared and stared at Cinder’s unhappy little face, and then I grabbed my suitcase from the closet and started sweeping things into it from the shelves. Oh, and Mr. Bunder! Hector! Cinder was right. I flooded with shame.

“Charlotte—” Cinder said, but there was nothing else I needed to know, and I scooped my stuff off the shelves and threw it into my suitcase as if I’d been visited by a power. “Charlotte—I’m sorry. I just meant you have a low self-opinion. You should try to be more positive about yourself.”

“You’d better see if Mitchell’s all right,” I said, glancing around to see if there was anything I’d forgotten. “I don’t think he is.”

“Mitchell,” Cinder said, “are you all right?”

“I just don’t feel like talking right now,” Mitchell said.

“Oh, great,” Cinder said. “What a great evening. One friend crashing around like Joan Crawford, and the other fried to a fucking crisp. Come on, Charlotte. Just let’s calm down and put your stuff away. John Paul will probably show up any minute to apologize, and he hates a mess.”

And, Lord—I’d almost forgotten my photograph of Robert. What was it doing up there anyway—as if he were the president of some company? I yanked it from the wall with both hands, and it tore in half. “Oh, Charlotte,” Cinder said. But, to my surprise, I didn’t care. Robert had never looked like that picture anyhow. That was how I’d wanted him to look, but he hadn’t looked like that.

“O.K., everyone,” Cinder said. “Let’s just be like normal people now, O.K.? Let’s just relax and have a beer or something. Beer, Mitchell?” she asked, holding a bottle out to him, but he seemed to be listening for a distant signal.

“Charlotte,” she said. “Beer?” But I, too, was busy elsewhere, and I didn’t turn when she said, “Shit. Well, cheers,” to see her tilt back the bottle herself, trying to make it look as if everything were completely under control. Well, she could try to make it look like that, she could try to make anything look like anything she wanted, but right then I just wanted everything to look like itself, whatever it might be. And I remember so clearly that moment, standing there astride my suitcase, with a part of that photograph of Robert in each hand, my legs trembling and my heart racing with a dark exultation, as if I’d just, in the grace of an instant, been thrown wide of some mortal danger.

While I sit with all the other patients in the waiting room, I always think that I will ask Dr. Wald what exactly is happening to my eyes, but when I go into his examining room alone it is dark, with a circle of light on the wall, and the doctor is standing with his back to me arranging silver instruments on a cloth. The big chair is empty for me to go sit in, and each time then I feel as if I have gone into a dream straight from being awake, the way you do sometimes at night, and I go to the chair without saying anything.

The doctor prepares to look at my eyes through a machine. I put my forehead and chin against the metal bands and look into the tiny ring of blue light while the doctor dabs quickly at my eye with something, but my head starts to feel numb, and I have to lift it back. “Sorry,” I say. I shake my head and put it back against the metal. Then I stare into the blue light and try to hold my head still and to convince myself that there is no needle coming toward my eye, that my eye is not anesthetized.

“Breathe,” Dr. Wald says. “Breathe.” But my head always goes numb again, and I pull away, and Dr. Wald has to wait for me to resettle myself against the machine. “Nervous today, Laurel?” he asks, not interested.

One Saturday after I had started going to Dr. Wald, Maureen and I walked around outside our old school. We dangled on the little swings with our knees bunched while the dry leaves blew around us, and Maureen told me she was sleeping with Kevin. Kevin is a sophomore, and to me he had seemed much older than we were when we’d begun high school in September. “What is it like?” I asked.

“Fine.” Maureen shrugged. “Who do you like these days, anyhow? I notice you haven’t been talking much about Dougie.”

“No one,” I said. Maureen stopped her swing and looked at me with one eyebrow raised, so I told her—although I was sorry as soon as I opened my mouth—that I’d met someone in the city.

“In the city?” she said. Naturally she was annoyed. “How did you get to meet someone in the city?”

It was just by accident, I told her, because of going to the eye doctor, and anyway it was not some big thing. That was what I told Maureen, but I remembered the first time I had seen Chris as surely as if it were a stone I could hold in my hand.

It was right after my first appointment with Dr. Wald. I had taken the train into the city after school, and when the doctor was finished with me I was supposed to take a taxi to my sister Penelope’s dancing school, which was on the east side of the Park, and do homework there until Penelope’s class was over and Mother picked us up. Friends of my parents ask me if I want to be a dancer, too, but they are being polite.

Across the street from the doctor’s office, I saw a place called Jake’s. I stared through the window at the long shining bar and mirrors and round tables, and it seemed to me I would never be inside a place like that, but then I thought how much I hated sitting outside Penelope’s class and how much I hated the doctor’s office, and I opened the door and walked right in.

I sat down at a table near the wall, and I ordered a Coke. I looked around at all the people with their glasses of colored liquids, and I thought how happy they were—vivid and free and sort of the same, as if they were playing.

I watched the bartender as he gestured and talked. He was really putting on a show telling a story to some people I could only see from the back. There was a man with shiny, straight hair that shifted like a curtain when he laughed, and a man with curly blond hair, and between them a girl in a fluffy sweater. The men—or boys (I couldn’t tell, and still don’t know)—wore shirts with seams on the back that curved up from their belts to their shoulders. I watched their shirts, and I watched in the mirror behind the bar as their beautiful goldish faces settled from laughing. I looked at them in the mirror, and I particularly noticed the one with the shiny hair, and I watched his eyes get like crescents, as if he were listening to another story, but then I saw he was smiling. He was smiling into the mirror in front of him, and in the mirror I was just staring, staring at him, and he was smiling back into the mirror at me.

The next week I went back to Dr. Wald for some tests, and when I was finished, although I’d planned to go do homework at Penelope’s dancing school, I went straight to Jake’s instead. The same two men were at the bar, but a different girl was with them. I pretended not to notice them as I went to the table I had sat at before.

I had a Coke, and when I went up to the bar to pay, the one with the shiny hair turned right around in front of me. “Clothes-abuse squad,” he said, prizing my wadded-up coat out of my arms. He shook it out and smiled at me. “I’m Chris,” he said, “and this is Mark.” His friend turned to me like a soldier who has been waiting, but the girl with them only glanced at me and turned to talk to someone else.

Chris helped me into my coat, and then he buttoned it up, as if I were a little child. “Who are you?” he said.

“Laurel,” I said.

Chris nodded slowly. “Laurel,” he said. And when he said that, I felt a shock on my face and hands and front as if I had pitched against flat water.

“So you are going out with this guy, or what?” Maureen asked me.

“Maureen,” I said. “He’s just a person I met.” Maureen looked at me again, but I just looked back at her. We twisted our swings up and let ourselves twirl out.

“So what’s the matter with your eyes?” Maureen said. “Can’t you just wear glasses?”

“Well, the doctor said he couldn’t tell exactly what was wrong yet,” I said. “He says he wants to keep me under observation, because there might be something happening to my retina.” But I realized then that I didn’t understand what that meant at all, and I also realized that I was really, but really, scared.

Maureen and I wandered over to the school building and looked in the window of the fourth-grade room, and I thought how strange it was that I used to fit in those miniature chairs, and that a few years later Penelope did, and that my little brother, Paul, fit in them now. There was a sickly old turtle in an aquarium on the sill just like the one we’d had. I wondered if it was the same one. I think they’re sort of prehistoric, and some of them live to be a hundred or two hundred years old.

“I bet your mother is completely hysterical,” Maureen said.

I smiled. Maureen thinks it’s hilarious the way my mother expects everything in her life (
her
life) to be perfect. “I had to bring her with me last week,” I said.

“Ick,” Maureen said sympathetically, and I remembered how awful it had been, sitting and waiting next to Mother. Whenever Mother moved—to cross her legs or smooth out her skirt or pick up a magazine—the clean smell of her perfume came over to me. Mother’s perfume made a nice little space for her there in the stale office. We didn’t talk at all, and it seemed like a long time before an Asian woman took me into a small white room and turned off the light. The woman had a serious face, like an angel, and she wore a white hospital coat over her clothes. She didn’t seem to speak much English. She sat me down in front of something which looked like a map of planets drawn in white on black, hanging on the wall.

The woman moved a wand across the map, and the end of the wand glimmered. “You say when you see light,” she told me. In the silence I made myself say “Now” over and over as I saw the light blinking here and there upon the planet map. Finally the woman turned on the light in the room and smiled at me. She rolled up the map and put it with the wand into a cupboard.

“Where are you from?” I asked her, to shake off the sound of my voice saying “Now.”

She hesitated, and I felt sick, because I thought I had said something rude, but finally the meaning of the question seemed to reach her. “Japanese,” she said. She put the back of her hand against my hair. “Very pretty,” she said. “Very pretty.”

Then Dr. Wald looked at my eyes, and after that Mother and I were brought into his consulting room. We waited, facing the huge desk, and eventually the doctor walked in. There was just a tiny moment when he saw Mother, but then he sat right down and explained, in a sincere, televisionish voice I had never heard him use before, that he wanted to see me once a month. He told my mother there might or might not be “cause for concern,” and he spoke right to her, with a little frown as she looked down at her clasped hands. Men always get important like that when they’re talking to her, and she and the doctor both looked extra serious, as if they were reminding themselves that it was me they were talking about, not each other. While Mother scheduled me for the last week of each month (on Thursday because of Penelope’s class), the cross-looking receptionist seemed to be figuring out how much Mother’s clothes cost.

When Mother and I parked in front of Penelope’s dancing school, Penelope was just coming out with some of the other girls. They were in jeans, but they all had their hair still pulled up tightly on top of their heads, and Penelope had the floaty, peaceful look she gets after class. Mother smiled at her and waved, but then she looked suddenly at me. “Poor Laurel,” she said. Tears had come into her eyes, and answering tears sprang into my own, but mine were tears of unexpected rage. I saw how pleased Mother was, thinking that we were having that moment together, but what I was thinking, as we looked at each other, was that even though I hadn’t been able to go to Jake’s that afternoon because of her, at least now I would be able to go back once a month and see Chris.

“And all week,” I told Maureen, “Mother has been saying I got it from my father’s family, and my father says it’s glaucoma in his family and his genes have nothing to do with retinas.”

“Really?” Maureen asked. “Is something wrong with your dad?”

Maureen is always talking about my father and saying how “attractive” he is. If she only knew the way he talks about her! When she comes over, he sits down and tells her jokes. A few weeks ago when she came by for me, he took her outside in back to show her something and I had to wait a long time. But when she isn’t at our house, he acts as if she’s just some stranger. Once he said to me that she was cheap.

Of course, there was no reason for me to think that Chris would be at Jake’s the next time I went to the doctor’s, but he was. He and Mark were at the bar as if they’d never moved. I went to my little table, and while I drank my Coke I wondered whether Chris could have noticed that I was there. Then I realized that he might not remember me at all.

I was stalling with the ice in the bottom of my glass when Chris sat down next to me. I hadn’t even seen him leave the bar. He asked me a lot of things—all about my family and where I lived, and how I came to be at Jake’s.

“I go to a doctor right near here,” I told him.

“Psychiatrist?” he asked.

All I said was no, but I felt my face stain red.

“I’m twenty-seven,” he said. “Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”

“Well, some people are,” I said.

I was hoping Chris would assume I was much older than I was. People usually did, because I was tall. And it was usually a problem, because they were disappointed in me for not acting older (even if they knew exactly how old I was, like my teachers). But what Chris said was, “I’m much, much older than you. Probably almost twice as old.” And I understood that he wanted me to see that he knew perfectly well how old I was. He wanted me to see it, and he wanted me to think it was strange.

When I had to leave, Chris walked me to the bar to say hello to Mark, who was talking to a girl.

“Look,” the girl said. She held a lock of my hair up to Mark’s, and you couldn’t tell whose pale curl was whose. Mark’s eyes, so close, also looked just like mine, I saw.

“We could be brother and sister,” Mark said, but his voice sounded like a recording of a voice, and for a moment I forgot how things are divided up, and I thought Mark must be having trouble with his eyes, too.

From then on, I always went straight to Jake’s after leaving the doctor, and when I passed by the bar I could never help glancing into the mirror to see Chris’s face. I would just sit at my table and drink my Coke and listen for his laugh, and when I heard it I felt completely still, the way you do when you have a fever and someone puts his hand on your forehead. And sometimes Chris would come sit with me and talk.

At home and at school, I thought about all the different girls who hung around with Chris and Mark. I thought about them one by one, as if they were little figurines I could take down from a glass case to inspect. I thought about how they looked, and I thought about the girls at school and about Penelope, and I looked in the mirror.

I looked in the mirror over at Maureen’s house while Maureen put on nail polish, and I tried to make myself see my sister. We are both pale and long, but Penelope is beautiful, as everyone has always pointed out, and I, I saw, just looked unsettled.

“You could use some makeup,” Maureen said, shaking her hands dry, “but you look fine. You’re lucky that you’re tall. It means you’ll be able to wear clothes.”

I love to go over to Maureen’s house. Maureen is an only child, and her father lives in California. Her mother is away a lot, too, and when she is, Carolina, the maid, stays over. Carolina was there that night, and she let us order in pizza for dinner.