Uses for Boys (11 page)

And I think, maybe it’s OK that Toy doesn’t want what I want. Like maybe she’s the
one who does some things, like be in Finn’s movies, but I’m the one that does other
things. Maybe I’m the one that had to move on, and maybe, someday, she’ll follow.
Maybe I’m the one who has to go first no matter what it takes.

Toy gives me the first hit which is a sign of affection or a kind of honor between
us. I poke my hand out of the cuff of my coat and take the pipe. Toy’s talking about
Finn, but she says she likes this dress on me. It’s one we bought together, a kind
of plaid, green-and-black housedress from the sixties. I wear it with black tights
and boots and a belt knotted around my waist.

We recline on the bench, our four feet in front of us and the pipe moving back and
forth between us. I want to tell her about Josh. How it’s changed. Or how it was never
what I thought it was, and how Angel says it’s not really about Josh.

And I want to ask her if it’s like that for her. If Finn. Or maybe Seth and the camp
counselor, if it’s beginning to pale and diminish the way it did with Josh. The way,
I think, it did for her mom. The way it did for my mom.

How my dad, her dad, after a time, were of no use at all.

I want to tell her about the $1,146. How I keep it in an envelope in one of the two
drawers that are mine in Josh’s dresser. How I like to count it. How I add to it and
subtract from it and how I keep the number in my head like a secret sign. I want to
tell her how I feel when I picture the envelope there, in its drawer. How it makes
me feel better and strong, and how, when I’m at work, I picture it in the drawer under
the black sweater and the gray T-shirt. How I can feel its thickening weight. How
it will feel when I spend it on the new apartment. And I’m not sure why, but maybe
if we talked about it, I would understand why this little collection of rooms makes
me feel less alone. And I’d like to. Talk about it.

But Toy is asking about a dress. A blue velvet dress from the fifties that we bought
together and sometimes I keep and sometimes she does. She’s talking about some shoes
she has, that would be perfect for the dress and how she wants to wear the dress in
a film Finn is making. I should give her the dress, she says.

Sometimes I just let Toy talk. Sometimes I interrupt her. Just wedge something else
in, something important, like the envelope. Mostly she doesn’t even notice. She has
something to say about everything. About anything. But I don’t do that now. I listen
to her talk about the dress. I picture it hanging on a hook, unworn, in Josh’s apartment.

“Sure,” I say. And I say that I’ll give it to her and maybe, I say, she can give me
the green glass beads. The ones we found in a bag of junk jewelry at Salvation Army
and then fought over who would keep them.

That reminds her. The beads remind her of Finn and the short film he made. A kind
of fairy tale, she says, starring his little sister, Viv. The little sister, Toy says,
is an angel.

“She’s a doll,” Toy says. “An angel.”

I think about emptying my tip jar every day and counting the money. I think about
the walk from the apartment to work and from work to the apartment. I think about
Josh and my funny dim reflection in the bathroom mirror. I think about Jane and the
women at the clinic and the way I picture Jane filling her home with the people she
loves. Look what’s happening to me, I want to say. Can’t you see?

There’s a vertiginous moment when Toy is all angles and the statue of Teddy Roosevelt
is looking down. Jagged naked trees with small green buds loom over us. I hear a buzzing,
like everyone racing but standing still and I wish I could climb inside her so she
could love me better.

“Magical,” she repeats and I watch her. I watch Toy talking. She tips her head to
the left and gestures with the pipe. She pauses to smoke from it. She looks at the
statue of Theodore Roosevelt on the horse. Finn and Viv. She has much to say about
Finn and Viv.

josh

We’re in the big chairs. Josh sitting, and me perched on the arm opposite. He expected
this, he says. He understands. You have to do what you have to do, he says. But that’s
all. Josh is not a fighter. Has he ever fought for anything? Things happen to him.

“Someday you won’t even remember me,” he says.

“I love you,” I say. But I don’t need him anymore and he knows that.

“I’ve always loved you,” he says. but it doesn’t sound so romantic anymore.

mom

My mom has to cosign the lease for the apartment and I can’t wait for her to see it.
In the damp morning the squat brick building is waiting too. Breathing. The city streets
where she used to walk with me. My hand in hers. She’ll see it. I’m sure. She’ll recognize
it. She’ll remember the blue bedroom, her foot next to mine, the tell-me-again times.

But she doesn’t. The room holds its breath. She looks around. She wonders aloud what
exactly I’m doing. “What are you trying to prove?” she says. Then, “I guess you’re
going to do what you’re going to do.”

I stand in the doorway and watch her. Her hair is so blond it’s white, piled on top
of her head. She leans against the windowsill with her back to the room.

“There isn’t even a view,” she says.

leaving

Josh doesn’t help me pack. He doesn’t help me move. He doesn’t come home for two days
after I tell him and when he does come home, he steals back my fake ID. When I ask
him about it he says he doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

He watches me. I take the things I brought: the picture of my mom, a soft pillow,
my down comforter. His apartment is that much emptier. He sits on the unmade bed drumming
the bedside table with his long fingers. He tells me a story, one I’ve heard before
and I already know how it ends. When I roll up the comforter and put it in a big plastic
bag, I ask him if he has anything, another blanket or something to keep him warm.

“Don’t worry about me,” he says.

Miguel from the cafe helps me move in a truck that he borrows from his brother. I
take him out to burgers and milkshakes to thank him and he tries to kiss me. I don’t
mind but I turn my face a little and he catches my chin with his lips.

floating

My new window looks out at a brick wall and when it’s wet I’ll know it’s raining.
I walk around the apartment touching the walls and hanging my clothes in the little
closet. I buy blue paint. I wear the overalls that Toy and I bought at Salvation Army
with a bandana over my hair and a thin white tank top underneath. I borrow a stepladder
from the manager who says I have to paint the walls again when I leave. It’s the color
of my dreams, I tell Toy in my head. I paint all four walls and carefully trim the
edges. There’s paint drying on my arms and some on my face. I lie down on the mattress
I bought for ninety-five dollars plus fifteen to have it delivered. I’m drifting in
the blue room. My bed is a cloud, a forest, a spaceship. It’s a cocoon. I spread out
like a five-pointed star and stare at the ceiling.

When I wake up it’s dark. Pink Floyd is playing on the radio. I run a bath, leave
my clothes in a pile on the floor and get in. The bathroom ceiling is strangely high
and the room’s painted a pale green. Not just the bath, but the whole room feels like
it’s underwater.

I submerge and the lip of the water pulls at my face. My toes stick out. My kneecaps.
The bottom of my rib cage. Floating. When I raise my head a little I can hear the
radio. I open my eyes. The room is a warm watery green.

After the bath I put on a full length, Marilyn Monroe–type satin nightgown that Toy
and I bought at Community Thrift. It’s black and smooth over my stomach. The apartment’s
cold so I wear it with wool socks and my lace-up boots, unlaced. Over it, I wear the
men’s plaid Pendleton shirt that Josh gave me.

Cross-legged on the mattress with a pile of fashion magazines and an old film playing
silently on the TV like moving wallpaper, I tear out a picture of a girl who’s appearing
from the shadows. Slats of bright yellow light fall on the planes of her face, hair,
cheek, chin, as she emerges from night and morning breaks through an unseen window.
She’s looking at someone who isn’t visible, but I can tell from the curve of her eyes
that she’s looking at someone who’s looking back at her. There’s a glimpse of her
bare shoulder, but her body’s in darkness. She’s not alone. She’s waiting for the
day to begin. I trim the rough edge of the page and tack the picture to my wall above
the bed.

imogen

I wake up in the blue room. Sheet warm and drifting in the middle of the bed. I know
exactly where I am. I bathe and dress in the underwater bathroom. Brew coffee in my
little coffeepot. My walk to work is through the park blocks. Past college students
and the Safeway and Theodore Roosevelt Rough Rider. Miguel teases me about living
alone.

“You need a husband,” he says.

In the afternoon I return home through the park blocks to my stacks of magazines with
their pictures of girls in summer dresses. My piles of clothes on the floor. I take
off my jacket and rest it on the back of the white wooden chair that I bought at Goodwill
and carried home on the bus.

At the thrift store I find a pale blue cotton fabric and make curtains for the apartment.
It takes me three nights to finish them and the fabric hangs straight down to the
floor. It’s getting warmer and when I leave the windows open the curtains wave into
the room and the sound from the street is restless and patterned like music. The dream
hasn’t returned since the abortion and when I go back for my checkup Jane isn’t there
because she had the baby.

“What did she name her?” I ask.

“Imogen,” the nurse says. “Isn’t that unusual?”

toy

Imogen. I walk home from the clinic in the warm damp evening air listening to the
slap of my boots on the concrete. I stop at Safeway to call Toy and she answers right
away.

“Come over,” I say and she says she will. The sky grows heavy and sunset-streaked
on my walk home.

She arrives wearing a wide-brimmed hat, a flowered dress, the denim jacket and perfume
that immediately colonizes the apartment. It smells like her mom.

“Finn gave it to me,” she says.

“Do you like it?”

“Of course I do,” she says. “I love it.”

She twirls around the small room, takes off her sandals and hands me the hat. I put
it on and go to the bathroom to look. I like the way it hides my eyes and makes me
look older. Mysterious. Toy looks over my shoulder. I lift one corner and meet her
eyes in the mirror. I’m looking for the part of her that feels what I feel. She’s
looking too. She reads my face, measures my eyes, traces my bones and brow.

“Let me do your makeup,” she says. And she goes back into the blue room for her bag.
I sit on my wooden chair in the tiny bathroom and face her. She outlines my eyes in
black liner. Applies a pale gold eye shadow and heavy red lipstick. This is how we
are when we don’t need anyone else.

I put on a new dress she brought. Strapless with a T-shirt underneath and high-heeled
boots and thick socks. I put on long gloves and lots of necklaces. Chains and pearls.
Over it I start to put on a men’s tuxedo jacket with shiny lapels, but Toy jumps up
and grabs it out of my hands. She’s never seen it before. She puts it on over her
flowered dress and vows never to give it back.

She puts on my moccasins, my long hippy beads, and takes back the hat. We march around
the room. Then we sit in the tiny kitchen, she in the white chair and me on a stool.
We’re smoking pot and drinking coffee. We get very serious. She leafs through a stack
of pictures I’ve torn from magazines and makes two piles.

“These I love,” she says. “These I hate.” In the pile of pictures she loves there’s
a skinny girl whose makeup looks like bruises. I know that summer’s coming and Toy
will sit in her mom’s backyard next to the empty pool and watch her pale legs turn
red in the sun.

She points at the skinny girl with the blank expression. “See how she looks,” she
says. “She looks like me.”

Sometimes everything bubbles up in me and I want her to know that I know. That I know
what it’s like. How it is with her mom. That I know that she wakes her mom up and
tries to get her to eat. That her mom gets dressed in the afternoon, puts on the makeup
and the dresses that she wore when she was married. That she drinks white wine and
watches herself in the mirror before falling asleep again, fully dressed, in her unmade
bed. I want Toy to know that I know. That no matter how many boys tell her they love
her, how many boys tell her she’s beautiful, how many boys crawl into her window at
night and make love to her, it doesn’t help. That I know it doesn’t help. She is my
sister and I love her. Like I want her to love me.

Instead, I look through the stack of pictures she loves. I find one of a girl whose
face is full to the camera. She’s squinting through big sunglasses and holding her
wide round hat down close on her head. Her smile is generous beneath the dark thick
glasses.

“This is what you look like to me,” I say. “Beautiful.”

a raft on the ocean

Toy is my family. Our story goes something like this: I have a blue bedroom in the
city and sometimes I sleep in the middle of my bed, all spread out. And sometimes
Toy comes over and she sleeps on one side, on her stomach and when she has bad dreams
she wakes me up.

“Anna?” she says.

And I say, “I’m here.” And then she goes back to sleep.

summer

When Toy leaves the next night and I’m alone again, I make a box of macaroni and cheese.
Above the stove I’ve taped a large black-and-white photograph of a family ripped from
a magazine. They tumble out of an oversized beach house, everyone laughing and dogs
running around the edges. Sometimes I count the people in the photograph. Kids and
grandparents and aunts and uncles. People in between. There’s a girl my age in faded
jeans and bare feet. It’s summer and the photograph is filled with light.