Sarah picked up the remote control and switched on the TV. Her own reflected image on the screen was immediately replaced by the familiar characters of an afternoon soap opera. She found the mute switch on the remote and killed off the dialogue. Sarah preferred to make up her own story, substituting what she believed they should be saying for whatever the writing staff had come up with. She wanted her dialogue to be more trite. More clichéd. More stilted and more stupid. She did not want to allow even the slightest touch of emotional accuracy or acceptable reality into her versions of the soap operas. She wanted it to be sloppy and overwrought and she did not trust the soap opera’s writers to be as over the top as she could be. She did not expect to be able to do this for much longer-the Big Box store where she’d purchased the television on credit was likely to come asking for it back any week. The same was true for her furniture, her car, and probably her house as well.
Her voice seemed to echo around her, her words slurred slightly, as if they were photographs taken out of focus.
“Oh Denise, I love you so much… especially your unbelievable Barbie-doll figure.”
“Yes, Doctor Smith, I love you too. Take me in your arms and spirit me and my medically augmented breasts away from here.…”
On the television screen, a dark-haired, strapping man who looked significantly more like a male model than a heart surgeon was embracing a statuesque blond woman whose most serious disease ever might have been a cracked nail or the sniffles. The only time she’d ever had to see a doctor was when she’d had her teeth capped. Their mouths moved with words, but Sarah continued to supply the dialogue.
“Yes, darling, I will… except your test results have come back from the laboratory, and, I don’t know how to say this, but you haven’t much time…”
“Our love is stronger than any disease.…”
Hah! Sarah thought. I bet it isn’t.
Then she told herself: I guess I’ll be writing the lovely Botoxed Denise and the handsome Doctor Smith out of my life.
Sarah walked over to the front window as the show’s credits scrawled across the screen. She stood motionless for a few moments, arms lifted above her head, totally exposed, half-hoping one of her nosy neighbors would see her, or that the afternoon yellow school bus from the junior high school would roll past jammed with students and she could give all the preteens a real show. Some of the kids on the bus would remember her from her days in the classroom. Fifth grade. Mrs. Locksley.
She shut her eyes. Look at me, she thought. Come on, goddammit, look at me!
She could feel tears starting to well up uncontrollably in the corners of her eyes, running hot down her cheeks. This was normal for her.
Sarah had been a popular teacher right up to the moment she resigned. If any of her former students saw her this day framed in her living room window stark naked, they would probably like her even more.
She had quit a little less than a year earlier, on one of the last days of the semester before summer vacation started. She quit on a Monday, two days after the bright, warm morning her husband had taken their three-year-old daughter on the most innocent of Saturday errands-a trip to the grocery store for milk and cereal-and never returned.
Sarah turned from the window and stared through the living room to the front door where the pile of mail was bunched up on the floor. Never answer the door, she said to herself. Never answer a ringing doorbell, or a hard knock. Don’t pick up a telephone when someone unknown calls. Just stay where you are, because it just might be a young state trooper with his Smokey the Bear hat in his hands, looking embarrassed and stammering, “There’s been an accident, and I hate to have to tell you this, Mrs. Locksley.…”
She sometimes wondered why her life had been ruined on such a fine day. It should have been a raining, sleeting, miserable, gloomy wintry mix, like this day was. But instead, it had been bright, warm, an endless blue sky, so when she fell to the floor that morning, her eyes had scoured the heavens above her, trying to find some shape that they could fix on, as if they could tether her to even a passing cloud, so desperate was she to hold on to something.
Sarah shrugged at the injustice of it all.
She looked outside the window. No one passing by. No naked sideshow this day. She ran her hands through her mane of red hair, wondering when it was that she’d showered, or taken a comb to the tangled thatch. A couple of days, at the least. She shrugged. I was beautiful once. I was happy once. I had the life I wanted once.
No more.
She turned and looked at the pile of envelopes by her front door. Reality intrudes, she told herself. She wished she were drunker or more stoned, but she felt totally sober.
So, she walked over to the pile of dunning letters. Take it all, she said. I don’t want to have anything left.
The nondescript letter with the New York postmark was resting on top. She didn’t know why it grabbed her attention, but she reached down and picked it up from the pile. At first, she imagined this was a really clever way some creditor had devised to get her to respond. Putting Second Notice in large red letters on the outside was really designed to have her ignore whatever the notice was demanding pretty rapidly. But not putting anything-well, she thought, that was smart. Her curiosity was pricked. Reverse psychology.
Okay, she told herself, as she idly tore open the envelope, I’ll give you this one. You won this round. I’ll read your threatening letter requiring me to pay money I don’t have for something I no longer want or need.
She started reading, and swiftly realized that whatever she had had to drink earlier and whatever pills she had taken that morning, it might not have been enough.
By the time she’d finished the message, for the first time she actually felt naked.
It was just after her last morning class when Jordan Ellis became Red Three, and she was utterly miserable. She did not know about her new role immediately because she was preoccupied with her latest in a yearlong series of failures: American history. She was staring at her most recent essay in the required course, which was emblazoned with a cryptic note from the professor See Me and a desultory grade: D-plus. She crumpled the sheets of typing in her fist, then sighed deeply and smoothed them out again. The grade had little to do with her ability; this she knew. Words, language, ideas, details-all of it came naturally to her. She had been an A student in the recent past, but she was no longer sure that she would ever be again.
Jordan felt a surge of anger. She knew that everything was tied together, all knots pulled tight. She was failing math, barely passing history, on the cusp of flunking Spanish and science, and just creeping along in English literature-and college applications hung over her head like a sword. She could no longer concentrate, no longer focus. No longer do the work that had once been so pleasant and had come to her so easily. The school psychologist had sat across from her a week earlier and glibly talked about acting out and behaving self-destructively in order to gain attention and wrapped up every failing grade with the easiest of emotional equations: “You were delivered a blow, Jordan, when your parents announced their divorce. You need to rise above it.”