I know he is the kind of date I should have. Not Theo Scieziesciez. Not Phil. Someone to make plans for the future with.
But the future bores me.
I imagine following it like a leaf into traffic.
I imagine eating it like a heart made of oatmeal.
“Someone called for you,” she says from her bed in the dark one night when I get back to the room with Phil.
“Who was it?” I ask.
Phil stands in the doorway, waiting: We try to wait until Cindy’s gone to sleep before coming back to the room to sleep. Phil takes the edge of the bed near the wall, farthest from Cindy. In the mornings, when we wake up, she’s usually gone.
“It was Shh-shh-shh,” she says, sounding groggy but annoyed. I’ve told Cindy about the detective, about my relationship with him, and also told her that I don’t want Phil to know. Later, he and I will have a small, dry argument about it. She’s aware of this.
“He sure calls a lot for someone who hasn’t managed to do one thing about your mother’s case in two and a half years, don’t you think?” Phil will say, but he’ll drop it as soon as I get defensive, as if he knows there’s more to this than he wants to know.
The day after the night Aaron and I kissed, Phil came to pick me up and bring me home.
As soon as I got home, I called the detective. “I’ve got a cold beer waiting for you in the fridge Saturday night, sweetheart,” he said, as he always says.
What was I doing, I wondered, with all these men? I thought how, if you removed their hearts from their bodies and set all three out on a table, you couldn’t tell one from the other. So what was I doing, suddenly, with all three of them at once?
Now, Phil’s crossing the shallow daffodil ditch between us: Nothing even close to blooming there. Maybe this year it won’t. Maybe Phil’s finally trudged through them so much, Mrs. Lefkowsky’s bulbs have given up, gotten the word, heard the ruthless boots above them, and decided to stay underground.
My breath on the bedroom window makes a humid, quickly evaporating kiss out of Phil, just a circle on the glass where the imprint of my lips has kissed away his face.
MY FATHER SEEMED PROUD AND RELIEVED THE DAY HE AND his girlfriend, May, drove me up to college.
“Good-bye, good-bye!” he waved from the front seat of his new car—a black Cadillac with leather seats. Riding to Ann Arbor in it had felt like hanging in the air from long elastic bands. Sixty miles an hour’s worth of world rushed by, and it was nothing but a liquid blur.
I imagine my father bought the Cadillac to impress May, who is exactly like her name—a petite container of spring that could explode any moment in a frenzy of petals and baby birds, screaming. She might have giggled uncontrollably on her first ride in my father’s new Cadillac.
May’s a good girlfriend for my father, I like her—who could not like May?—but being in her presence for more than an hour makes me feel ditzy, agitated, a bit slaphappy, and very tired. As we converse pleasantly, I feel my voice rise higher and higher in pitch to match hers, as if we’ve both been breathing helium, gasping at weightless white balloons as my father sits in slim-lipped silence between us, seeming pleased.
At one time, May was married to a textbook salesperson like herself. “But he was always depressed,” she said. “He never wanted to do anything.” Her hair is ash-blonde and bobbed above her ears. Permed tightly, it stands up all over her head, as if, at the beauty parlor, she got zapped with a cattle prod and it made her perkier, but nervous.
She’s a lot younger than my father—only thirty-four—but seems maternal, in a childlike way, and eager to pick up where my mother left off. The day they left me at the University of Michigan, she had a lot of advice about college, about boys, about life. After we’d hauled my boxes to the room I would be living in (Cindy wasn’t there yet, and it was blank faced—all linoleum, just two thin mattresses on metal frames, two battered desks, and a sink that echoed boing boing as it dripped), May said, “Don’t take drugs. But if you do, make sure you know what you’re taking. Someone slipped me some angel dust in college, and I’ve never been the same.”
It explained a lot.
I imagined May in college—studious, sober, and unsentimental—before the angel dust incident, during which she’d sprouted wings, burst into frenetic flapping, been launched into the sky like a divine bottle rocket, and glimpsed the face of God—pure sweetness and sparkling light, like a lungful of air freshener on a cool spring day—before settling back to earth, altered forever.
“Good-bye!” my father said and waved. In his new Cadillac, they buoyed away.
The first few weeks at college, I thought things had changed—that, leaving Garden Heights, leaving my frilly bedroom and my mother’s stiff armchairs, her lipsticks still lined up on the bathroom counter where she’d left them, that I’d finally left my mother, rather than the other way around.
But then the dreams began again—my mother in a white coffin, my mother in a snowstorm at the morgue. Or I’d dream I was walking with Phil across the icy Rite Aid parking lot, watching my feet, then see her face float up under my boot. In one dream, May came to me in my bedroom back in Ohio and said she’d found my mother in the cardboard container of a TV dinner. In another, Detective Scieziesciez looked up from between my legs, where he was giving me a dream orgasm—the kind you never reach, the kind you wake up still wanting—and said, “By the way, your mother called my office. She’s in a bank-deposit box in another town.”
In the middle of every dream, I’d wake up screaming, and Cindy would be standing over me in her boyfriend’s SAVE THE WHALES T-shirt, biting her nails. “Jesus, Katrina”—she likes to call me that because it’s more ethnic, more interesting than Kat—“What’s wrong with you?” she’d ask. In the morning, she’d look at me carefully, as if I might crack right down the middle like a plaster statue, badly cast, and step out of my body.
It touched me when she said, “I’m worried about you.”
We’d only shared a room for a few weeks, but we were friends.
She said, “Does your therapist know about these dreams?”
I HAVEN’T SEEN DR. PHALER SINCE AUGUST, WHEN SHE wished me well at college, shook my hand, told me to call her when I came home for Christmas break if I wanted an appointment, if I felt I needed help. I never told her about Detective Scieziesciez because there never seemed to be a way to bring it up, and I stopped telling her about my dreams long ago, when she made it clear she didn’t think they had anything to offer. “Dreams don’t necessarily mean anything, Kat. We all have very strange dreams.”
And I wondered then, why? Why do we all have strange dreams? Why doesn’t sleep just switch off our brains like a light?
Instead, all over Garden Heights at night, bankers and lawyers and housewives are attending orgies, talking to the dead, flying over their own houses naked, wearing wings, and then it’s forgotten, everything is normal, and the plumber calls to say he’ll be a little late.
How is it we manage to get out of bed in the morning, face each other, organize our ordinary days, knowing where we’ve come from, and where we’ll be going again?
A few days after my father and May dropped me off in Ann Arbor, Detective Scieziesciez called and asked me if he could come up, meet me at a Sheraton Inn, spend the night—he had some business in Lansing, and I was in between—and I said yes, although my first classes were the next day, and I was nervous. I wanted to appear brighteyed and eager to my professors, my fellow students, but I also wanted to spend the night with Detective Scieziesciez, never actually having slept a whole night with a man. A few times, Phil and I had fallen asleep on the couch together, and I’d stayed at the detective’s condo once until five o’clock in the morning, but I wanted a whole night, dusk to dawn, in bed with a man, like a boat ride from one end of a black pond to the other.