“That boy who does my lawn, he’s really good,” Raymond says. He is out the door and into a night filled with the hum of telephone wires and occasionally the sound of a faraway car carrying someone home. He walks across the street and into his backward house, and I imagine the sound of his shoes landing on the linoleum as he kicks them off, sits down on his couch, and flicks on his TV.
I take a glass of wine upstairs with me and drink it in bed with the lights off while in my head I pick out an appropriate outfit for work the next day. Sometime later I hear a car, then a key in the door, and then my mother’s whispering voice and that of a man’s. I hear my mother in the kitchen, probably putting the kettle on the stove to boil while maybe she sizes up this man, measuring her desire for him. Since I’ve been home is the first time that I’ve really, truly imagined my mother having sexual desires, and each time I imagine it I receive a small shock, as if some foreign source is administering charges to let me know this is forbidden territory. I listen to the hushed tones of my mother and this man as I finish the wine and set the glass by my bed next to the other glasses from other nights. It is the moments when the low tones turn to carefully suppressed laughter — at a minute gesture of my mother’s or a joke told by the man that I cannot hear, something silly and quickly forgotten but shared between them — that I am most an outsider in this house. I lie in such a way as to be the smallest that I can be, heading for sleep while downstairs my mother’s life continues.
The graphics-design firm where I work is sponsoring a benefit ball for cancer research. This is what my father died of, so I try to use this to help me feel more involved. My job as their temp is to handwrite the names of the guests on one thousand invitations. They learned from the agency that I know a little calligraphy, and they think it would be charming for a graphics-design firm to have handwritten invitations. That sometimes the pen gets away from me is all right with them — it’s that much more of a personal touch. For the past week now I’ve been sitting at a desk in the middle of the office, balancing each invitation carefully on a clutter of papers and slowly, carefully carving out a name. The other women in the office call me by the names of past temps and generally don’t notice me as they discuss seating arrangements for the dinner preceding the ball.
“Boy, girl, boy, girl doesn’t work when there’s less boys than girls,” the tall blond with the baby-doll bangs says today. It’s been the main argument all week.
“Wouldn’t you know, less boys than girls?” the short redhead says. She doesn’t have pictures of a family taped above her desk, though she does have several of a dachshund.
“I just do not want to sit next to you-know-who,” says the blond, mouthing you-know-who rather than saying it out loud. I admire her drive, the way she knows where she doesn’t want to sit.
As they discuss whether sequins are too much, I have the dangerous feeling that I often get at work. The feeling is similar to dreaming that I’m going to do something against my will, such as stay in my mother’s house forever. It’s like the invisible force dragging us toward the Twister in the picture, which I’ve always thought of as somehow real; the fact of the picture itself has brought a reality to the pose, when the pose was just something my father shouted from behind the camera.
The blond scratches the back of her head with nails stiff and effective while she determines where she will sit. Deep down, she is acting too. I’m beginning to suspect that, deep down, all desire is faked. I imagine tearing the picture of me, my mother, and my grandmother into tiny pieces and throwing them out the window with the invitations to flutter and land randomly. Pieces of our faces pushing through the air while the sky falls away. There would be no telling where it would all end up, but it would be anything but predictable. It would be something to counter this endless process of recovery — my grandmother wanting my mother to recover from my father’s death and now me, recovering from a badly scripted life. As my mother moves toward the vacancy left by my grandmother, and I move through my mother’s cast-off ages, I wonder how one recovers from making a life.
The blond leaves the room for a minute and then comes back to say that the Xerox machine isn’t working again. I look up because I know this has something to do with me. Within minutes I am out the door with an armful of speeches for the benefit ball that begin “Welcome ladies and gents” and “What a wonderful crowd we have gathered here tonight.”
Despite the new braided tail down his back, I recognize the guy behind the counter at the copy place. He’s someone I went to high school with, maybe I had a crush on him. His facial features have grown with his body; they are grotesque. I make my copies quickly in a corner and hope to leave the store unnoticed, but he comes from behind.
“I know you,” he says, “I know you,” like he’s blowing my cover. He leans against the copy machine and tells me how his band broke up a few years after college, how his girlfriend had a baby and left him a year later for his old drummer, how they all run into each other around town and it’s a bad scene. Man, he says, and even though I hardly knew him in high school, he is looking to me for comfort. I copy my hand by accident.
“Better watch that,” he says as a black-and-white version of my palm slides out of the machine. “Stuff ’s radioactive.” I could take him home, and maybe we’d push against each other hard for a few hours, straining to find meaning in skin. We’d be new to each other but still safely anchored in the familiarity of high school. I start to count on my fingers how many years till I’m thirty-three. It’s a goal I’ve set for myself, to start to take responsibility for my life then — I’m only two fingers away.
I pay for the copies quickly and head out of the store.
“See you around,” he says in a way that makes me suspect he is watching me walk.
When I get back to the office, I carve my initials into the leg of my desk with a pen. I am a crazy teenage rebel trying to leave a physical mark in this office, and on this earth.
I call the community health center from work at my second fifteen-minute break. After the third loop of the same menu — self-esteem, assertiveness training, eating disorders, healthy relationships, body image, healing workshops — I get a real person on the other end of the line.
“Can you describe this pain in more specific terms?” the voice asks. It is a high, female voice that sounds as if it is coming through a wind tunnel, like this is someone who has used nose spray wildly. Her nostrils are hairless and smooth.
I begin to try. I explain that it feels something like when the gynecologist checks my ovaries, one hand inside and one pressing from the outside, as if but for my skin, the doctor would have an ovary in her hand. I tell her it’s like that but not quite. I tell her that the pain seems to float in the abdominal area, that I’m worried it may land and become something serious, in which case what will I do? — I’m only a temp and have no health insurance. I tell her that sometimes I have delicious fantasies in which this pain does in fact turn out to be something tragic and this fatal diagnosis slices the fatty part off of my days until they are sculpted and meaningful. I begin to tell her that the pain began sometime in this last year, two years before I turn thirty-three like my mother in the picture, when my father was still alive and I was not even born, but the woman is giving me another number. It is the number of a counselor who she thinks would be better able to help me. I say this pain is my own personal damage, but the woman continues to give me the number. I pretend to take it down, saying it back to her at the speed that I would be writing it if I were actually writing it. My fifteen-minute break is over. Someday soon I will go down to the community health center and have a physical, though I worry that I might be disappointed to discover that this pain doesn’t set me apart at all.