“Randall could figure something out for you here,” she said. “And not just the elementary stuff. Lord knows you can write. He’d be having you write whole briefs for him, would be my guess.”
Her mother had done that night what everyone in town had been doing for weeks: tried to convince her that the wooded borders of Ketchum, Idaho, were where the world ended. Everything you needed was right here, they all said. But her book and her postcard and something else inside her told her otherwise. She believed that the world was wide and available and filled with the potential for feeling and subversion and art and wonder. She secretly took pleasure in the fact that all of Ketchum, including her own mother, thought she was crazy. She was smart enough to know that crazy also meant brave.
“But you’ll land on something there, too,” her mother said that night. “You’ve always been so pretty. And they do have all the big modeling agencies there.”
From her mother, this was a backhanded compliment, and they both knew it. Lucy knew that her mother meant that she would probably not land on something, not unless that something was as unsubstantial as modeling. Apparently the Lord knew she could write briefs for a subpar lawyer in Ketchum, but in the Capital of the World? Not a chance. Her mother also understood that it made Lucy uncomfortable when people talked of her beauty, which was as much a fact as her suitcase, black and too big, sitting there in the room with them. It was the kind of beauty that model scouts saw in fourteen-year-olds at the mall — and that might have happened to her if there was any mall for her to wander around in — undeniable, accessible, wholesome, and yet vaguely sad. Her hair had been white-blond when she was little, and now it was the tawny, vulnerable brown of towheads after puberty everywhere, and its lackluster color only enhanced the very noticeable smoothness, the very particular rosiness, the very recognizable symmetry of her face.
“Models don’t eat, Mom,” she said, tossing a pair of sneakers into the suitcase. “I, on the other hand, am constantly starving.”
“I’m just worried,” her mother said, shifting her motherly weight onto her hand. “You know how I get.”
“I do know how you get, and it’s ridiculous,” said Lucy. “I’m an adult, Mom. I’ll figure it out.”
She knew it was unconvincing, because she was unconvinced herself. Was she an adult? Would she figure it out? She had no idea what she would do in New York; she only knew that she was going. She imagined an office on an eleventh floor. She imagined a skirt with pleats, something she did not have yet because you could only find it there. And then she imagined darker things, in vague spurts that excited her immensely: a nightclub with a strobe light, a man’s arm with a tattoo on it, a fiery night of smashed windows and stealing; she had seen footage of the blackout on the news.
“Well you’ve always been different, haven’t you?” her mother said. “You’ve always had… what is it? Zest. You’ve had zest.” Her blue eyes were clouding and Lucy didn’t want it to come, though she knew it would: the story of how she was born.
“I still remember when you were born,” her mother said. Here it was. Lucy didn’t want to hear the story because there was no story, and she had heard it too many times. The story about the hardware store — where she had been employed for the last six years, organizing bolts and washers and wire — on the thirteenth of October, just after the storm that had blanketed all of Idaho in a thick white that would stay for months on end. Winter had come early, and so had Lucy, apparently, pushing her way out of her mother three whole weeks before her due date, right there in the aisle of Mason & Mick’s, between the lightbulbs and the light sockets. Mick, of Mason & Mick’s, had cut the cord with a pair of garden shears.
Lucy didn’t want to have only one story. She wanted a whole life made out of stories: momentum, propulsion, characters, change. In a small town like this there were only so many ways to feel moved by change, and they were too subtle to be interesting — a snowstorm like the one on the night she was born; a litter of puppies born in town; a boy’s hand on her breast in the cab of his musty truck; the married art teacher, telling her in his soft teacher voice that he just couldn’t do this anymore. Though she always tried to provoke something into happening — calling the teacher’s house in the middle of the night, getting drunk on the bottle of Johnnie Walker her parents had in the cabinet, going to loud concerts and drunken bonfires in the middle of snowy fields — the stories always ended up the same. There were only, after the bonfires or fiery moments of passion were over, more wet drives to friends’ houses, pale afternoons filled with rivers and waiting, gas station parking lots, excuses. Time in Ketchum moved like the shadows that cloaked her house — so slowly you couldn’t see it.
“Good story, Mom,” she said with that same sarcasm, although she couldn’t help but smile. She took a deep breath and scanned the dim bedroom, as if to breathe in the gymnastics trophies from the days when a cartwheel earned you your own personal statue, the framed photographs of friends making peace signs, the posters of rock bands that had never passed through Ketchum but whose records she found in free bins at the thrift stores downtown. These were all the things she would leave behind. She scanned the hundreds of faces, animals, mouths, and eyes that lived in the grain of the wooden walls. Though she had grown up in this house, knew all its creaks and cracks between planks, she had still allowed it to frighten her: the two-dimensional wood-grain animals, the vulnerability of its being in the middle of nowhere, ready to be ravaged by fire or lightning bolt, the sounds the house made, which her mother assured her was “settling”: the house getting more comfortable in itself, while she was growing less so. What she wanted was people. Potential saviors, all at arm’s reach from her, so that if the animal in the wood grain jumped out of the wood she could scream, and someone would hear.
“It’s almost time to leave, girlywog,” her mother said. She smelled like Lubriderm lotion and damp soil.
“I’m ready,” she had said, feeling only remotely guilty as she set Downtown into her suitcase, so shiny and satisfying in its library plastic.
When she looked back on it later, she would think of her arrival and the weeks that followed as some of the most benevolent she could remember, when heartbreak belonged to the city itself — beggars on Bond Street, fearless rats, a hand hanging out the window of the subway at the West Fourth Street station, holding a knife. Her arrivaclass="underline" the red-eye flight, the heavy suitcases, the air thick with that lethargic summer hope. The taxicab that smelled of urine, candy, and leather: the taxicab, a thing that so epitomized the New York of her mind, that made her feel adult and modern and that raced toward the skyline almost as fast as her heart. Then the street — Wooster, that was the wonky, exciting name of the street where the taxi had dropped her — that smelled like garbage, smoke, and something sweet, which she would later find out were the delicious sticky buns at R & K, a bakery around the corner on Prince, whose walls were tiled in yellow bricks, sticky with sugar and grime. But that first day, with the scarily hot sun beating down on the crowded street, she hadn’t known about R & K, just as she hadn’t known about anything that lay in front of her. Especially not where to go right then, toting her heavy suitcase, people swarming around her as she stood paralyzed on the street corner, looking up into the sky as if it might give her an answer.
But, as if by telepathic magic, it did. The sky produced, on a small yet significant gust of hot wind, a flying piece of paper. The flying piece of paper read Room for rent. Girls only. Call Jamie. Under the handwritten message was a lipstick mark, pink and puckered — someone had actually kissed the paper — and then a phone number made up of mostly ones and twos. She couldn’t help but link the word girl to girlywog, and to the postcard, and to the paper trail of fate that had brought her here. She found herself fascinated by the kiss, wanting, oddly, to kiss it back. The paper had a phone number on it, which she called from a pay phone, with one of the quarters her mother had made her keep in her pocket, for emergencies. What emergency could be handled with a quarter, Lucy hadn’t been sure, but as the coin clanked into its silver slot she silently thanked her mother, closed her eyes tightly as the phone made its first loud ring.