Ophelia, Alive Read online

  He laughs. “That happens to all of us when we start in a new field. Didn’t I ever tell you about my residency?”

  “When would you have told me about that?”

  “Yeah, good point,” he says. “Anyway, it was day after day of being elbow-deep in bodily fluids, with doctors and nurses both screaming in my ear. I went home crying more often than not.”

  “That’s manly.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  I immediately regret saying what I just said. I try to make amends by forming the goalposts again, and his fingers kick another peanut between them. And I stare at the bar, tracing a pattern in the puddle, and say, “What kept you going back every day?”

  He sighs. “The knowledge that maybe there were more important things than being liked or respected. The realization that even though hard work sucks, you still have to do it because there are people who need your help.”

  “Didn’t realize you were such an idealist.”

  “Well, there was that, and then there was the fact that after so many years of med school, I didn’t know how to do anything else.” He clears his throat. “And, y’know, my folks would have killed me if I gave up medicine.”

  The silence after that hangs heavy in the air, while I push the water around on the shining wood. “Mom cut me off.”

  I don’t know why I said that. I shouldn’t have. Of all the things I could have said, that was probably the worst choice. He says, “Oh.”

  “Please don’t think that I mean—”

  “No, I get it,” he says, and reaches for his wallet.

  “Dad, I don’t want money. I’m working for a living now.” (Crap, now I’m committed to that.)

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, I’m in the family business. I work at a hospital.”

  “No kidding.” He’s looking up again, back at my eyes.

  “Yeah, Sara got me a job at her place,” I tell him.

  “That was good of her.”

  I shrug. “Yeah.”

  “A little out-of-character.”

  “Yeah.”

  And an old classic blues song starts playing on the speakers:

  Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face;

  Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face;

  Just bear this in mind:

  A true friend is hard to find,

  So don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face.

  He says, “How is Sara these days, anyway?”

  “I thought you guys still talked.”

  He’s tapping on the table with a peanut, keeping time with the drums and the bass. “We did, yeah, for a long time. And then we kind of just...stopped. Right around the time she got kicked out of Yale. I send her a check sometimes, but that’s it.”

  “Oh.”

  You know your mother would talk about you;

  Your own sisters and your brothers, too.

  They don’t care how you’re tryin’ to live—

  They’ll talk about you still;

  Yes, but—bear this in mind:

  A true friend is hard to find,

  So don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face.

  He says, “Yeah, what happened with that anyway?”

  “With what?”

  “Yale. How’d she get herself kicked out?”

  I shrug. “She had some sort of drug she was developing as her thesis. It didn’t work, she made herself some enemies, something like that.”

  “Huh.”

  You know they’ll jump you up and down;

  They’ll carry you ‘round and ‘round.

  Just as soon as your back is turned,

  They’ll be tryin’ to crush you down.

  Just bear this in mind:

  A true friend is hard to find,

  So don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face.

  I say, “Yeah, the whole thing was pretty weird.” I slam my empty glass on the bar. “Anyway, she moved back in with Mom and she’s working in the morgue now.”

  “What is it with you two and giving up?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You, giving up on teaching the first time you hit a bump. Her, giving up on medicine because she’s been kicked out of one school. I mean—maybe it’s none of my business. Maybe that’s the wrong thing to say.”

  “You’re damn right it’s the wrong thing to say. Y’know what? Maybe it’s because we had such a great example from you and Mom. You wanna talk about giving up?”

  “Come on, that’s not fair.”

  “No, y’know what’s not fair? Walking out on your kids and your marriage. That’s what’s not fair. And now you’re going to lecture me about my life?”

  “She kicked me out,” he says.

  Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face;

  Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face;

  Just bear this in mind:

  A true friend is hard to find,

  So don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face.

  Those four words—She kicked me out—hang in the air, in the smoke, and I try to decide what I’m supposed to say in response as the song changes to a Christina Aguilera number I haven’t heard since grade school. He flicks another peanut and I barely get my fingers up in time. I don’t know why it makes such a difference to hear those words (didn’t I already know this? didn’t she keep the house?) but somehow it does, as if I’ve been harboring the wrong grudge for years, as silly as that is. Like maybe I should have said something one of those Tuesday nights when my mother would pick at her terrible cooking and complain about him.

  Not that I would have had much to say. I don’t even know this man.

  But I have to fill the silence. “I’ve been thinking a lot lately,” I tell him, “about that old house we used to live in—remember it? Where Sara and I slept in the attic?”

  “Of course I remember it. I had to fix part of it every single day we were living there.”

  “Good memories there.”

  “Yeah...a few.” Now he’s finished another beer. He sets it down on a coaster.

  “I was just thinking—y’know—that place just had so much soul. All those secret passages and hidden nooks. They don’t make houses like that anymore. The house we moved into, the one Mom lives in, it’s nothing like that. No secrets. No soul.”

  He laughs.

  “What?”

  He says, “You do know why it had all those passages and compartments. Right?”

  “I...”

  “You really don’t?”

  “I guess I thought that people were just more interesting in the past.”

  He laughs at me again. “The house was built in the ‘20s, Ophie. The 1920s. You know anything about them?”

  “Uh—flappers? Flagpole sitting?”

  “I’m talking about prohibition, Ophie.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you’re saying that—”

  “The nooks were for hiding hooch, and the passages were for escaping from cops.”

  “Oh.” He sets up another peanut, and I give him the goalposts, and it pulls to the right and bounces off my finger, but it’s good. “So much for soul.”

  He shrugs. “One guy’s soul is another guy’s sin, I guess.” He pays for the beer. “Listen, sorry if I’m cutting this short, but I have a twenty-four-hour shift coming up, so I should probably get going. You need a ride back to campus?”

  “Actually, I think I’ll hang out here a while longer.”

  “You sure?” he says.

  “Yeah,” I tell him. “I have a lot to think through.”

  He pauses, half-standing, fixing his coat. “Okay, if you’re sure.” He takes a step toward the door, but then he turns around. “Listen, would it be weird if I hugged you again?”

  “Uh—”

  “I won’t, if it’d be weird.”

  I hold out my hand, and I give him a handshake. It’s weird and it’s awkward.

 
; Then I change my mind, and I pull him down to my level and I put my arm around his back. It’s not quite the little-girl-in-her-daddy’s-arms fantasy I remember from years ago, but it feels like an important first step. And he smiles awkwardly and he just barely says, “Thanks.” He heads back toward the door; pauses; turns around. “You really think nineties movies were that bad, huh?”

  “Have you thought of a third yet?”

  “Nah, I guess not.”

  And he leaves.

  sun. jan. 16.

  5:17 pm.

  not drunk. yet

  I spent the rest of the afternoon hiding at the bar. I know that’s stupid, that I need to face my problems, but whatever, it’s what I ended up doing. My head’s been reeling, spinning in and out of the now, dizzy from everything I’ve learned today—first Kate’s weird story about last night, then the sudden realization of what I’ve done, and now all this stuff about my dad.

  (He looked so lonely.)

  I’m sitting exactly where I was when he left, staring at the same fingernails with the same sticky paint chips under them. And the dim lights are shining the same way, casting jagged shadows in the same places. Everything looks exactly the same as it would if he had never been sitting on the stool next to me.

  People are starting to filter in now, grasping desperately at the last vestiges of the weekend before the sun forces its way back over the horizon. I guess I’m doing the same thing, really—sitting here, on my fourth beer, trying to put off life for as long as I can.

  But the thing is, I know what I have to do.

  The obligatory course of action here is so obvious that part of me can’t believe I’m just sitting here. I need to walk back to my room, find the whole supply of Sara’s wonder drug, and flush it down the nearest toilet. Then I need to tell Kate everything and ask her (very politely) to watch me carefully. Or just tie me up, or call the cops, or something.

  God.

  It’s that last bit, the part about Kate, that’s got me glued to this sticky barstool, wasting my time. She must have put two and two together by now, must have figured out where the bodies are coming from, can’t possibly still be giving me the benefit of the doubt. And yet, she looked at me so innocently at breakfast. You sure you’re not taking anything? Ambien, or something?

  Maybe she just really doesn’t know.

  Is that possible? I mean, because if she doesn’t know, I don’t have to tell her anything. The bodies are gone, and there’s no harm done otherwise (right?). I go off the stuff, things go back to normal, everything’s fine.

  Of course, normal is a relative term, and at the moment it means half of a degree that I care about less every day, a job that I suck at, a mother who’s banishing me from my own bedroom, and a fat ass that diet and exercise can’t seem to get rid of (mainly because I hate dieting and exercising, but who’s counting?). So what is it I want?

  I mean, really want?

  It’s a question I haven’t asked myself in a long time, and having it at the front of my thoughts is strange and a little scary. The more I turn it over in my head, the more real it becomes, till it’s concrete, an object that’s floating in the foam of the beer in my hand, bobbing and spinning till it’s coated in sticky, brown sweetness, making rims on the glass. It’s a jagged idea with sharp angles that sparkle like stained glass, igniting the air, till it turns into sun, an early-March sun, one that lights up the wisps of the cold afternoon with the laughter of kids and feet pounding on grass. And the sky is a blue-yellow-white, while I awkwardly cradle a black walkie-talkie in my hand and watch seventh-graders chasing a dull, pockmarked soccer ball up and down patchy lushness. The crush chases after the white-and-black leather till the knee I remember comes sliding out (hard). The one knee, the one I can’t scrub from my mind, skidding hard across grass, across gravel, mixing blood with the dirt and flesh with the green. Drags a girl behind it, a small one, attached to it, scared and alone, breaking off from the crush in a bloody mitosis that pushes this small, crying, scraped, sweaty thing up against me. Two eyes, deep and brown, looking at me through tears, and they’re so far below me. She begs for a hand to reach out toward the muck (which is her). The sun hangs in the south, still refusing to rise to the blue-yellow dome’s center (though it’s high noon), and the breeze makes me shiver in lingering dew. The face at my feet, attached to the knee, with jagged adult teeth wedged awkwardly into the mouth of a child, and bangs not-quite-grown-out, and small bits of acne assaulting its jawline, looks up at me (desperate); I feel my gut sink and my eyes fill with fear. A thing like a human, but smaller and awkward, with parts where they shouldn’t be, dreams that are nonsense (naïve) and no thought past I wonder what lunch is today and I hope this pain stops really soon. My past and my future collide into sparks in the big, yellow (dying) star caught in her eyes, and in them I see nothing but life marching down into death for eternity. An endless parade of our wombs all ripped open and filling the world with more of this pain, all stretching from now to forever. With every one born, there’s a thousand new ways to create pain invented, but one way to stop it (just one). And it’s then that my hand reaches out—and I see it, stretched out there in front of me, piercing through thin strands of mist, reaching down into hers with its black, half-chewed fingernails, thumb with red ink stains, and shaking (still shaking!), but reaching out, down, on its own somehow. Pushed by a fire inside me that burns with a blue and a yellow that’s brighter than sky, and it burns through my fear and my panic and pride. In front of my face in a downward salute, cells standing alert in full battle formation, a phalanx of fingers with cavalry (muscle and bone) spread out toward the horizon. It’s fighting for life, even just for one moment, an army that stands to paint Life! on the sky and the sea and the air and the land in bright yellow and blue—life that fights and that struggles, made perfect in fighting for nothing beyond what just is, life that’s breaking through pavement and shattering, cells in cells, light in light, and a hand in the mist, and it’s mine. Reaching out, and it’s mine, shaking hard, and it’s mine, and she takes it. Crooked fingers reach up from her small, desperate frame, seeking nothing but hooks she can hang her resolve on. The heat of a thousand and one suns exploding between our two hands, mine calloused and full and hers small and still-smooth. Exploding with life! that’s refusing to die in the shredding of dirt and crushed rock. And I pull her up. Her feet are too big and her frame is too small, but her eyes soak up light and she smiles. I say Are you okay? and she tells me Yes, thank you, but still her knee’s bleeding. Blood spackles the ground, leaking out in defiance, and catching the wind to approach shining blackness (my shoes). My hand fumbles into my purse, its black nails and its callouses searching (a mind of their own) for a Band-Aid I know that I have, left over from hiking two years ago, while I say, Hold on, you’re bleeding. She holds her knee still while I crackle the paper, till SpongeBob comes free, and he’s just big enough to fit over her scrape. The red disappears into cool, healing calm, and the next thing I know there are arms around my neck. Just two tiny arms, squeezing me in a hug that shines brighter than sunlight and brighter than life. And for one perfect moment I don’t even care about later today, when the principal tells me to come to her office and yells at me, saying We never give medical care to the children and We could get sued and If you were a teacher I’d fire you now and Hey, while you’re thinking on how you should never give Band-Aids to students, perhaps you should think about how you should keep your hands off of them too. Maybe spend your few months here developing lesson plans rather than trying to make friends. I don’t think of the tears or the weekend spent crying in bed watching SyFy and eating Trix in my pajamas. I just hold her until she stops crying, and life pushes the sun to the top of the sky, and my life is what life should be, just for one moment, in blue and in yellow, the beer and the cigarettes, voice getting louder and louder...

  “Ma’am?”

  What?

  “Ma’am? Are you all right?”

  I’m facedown in a pu
ddle of beer, breathing in bubbles and hops. Cold cherry wood against my face and a headache in just one temple.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry. I guess I just fell asleep. I, uh, had a late night. Last night. Sorry.”

  He picks up my glass and puts it in a bus tray and says, “Maybe you should head home.”

  “Look, I’m not drunk, if that’s what you’re thinking.” But my speech is slurred. “I had, what? Three-and-a-half beers? I just fell asleep.”

  “Well, but someone with such a low bodyweight can—”

  “Wait, you think I’m skinny?”

  “I didn’t say that, just—”

  “But I look small to you.”

  “Well—yeah.”

  “So it works. I’m finally skinny. Thank God.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Give me another.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Look, I’m walking home. What does it matter to you how many I have?” He pours me another Guinness, and I smile. This drug may have some crazy side effects, but at least it works as advertised. (Two people dead, but it’s too late for them, right? I may as well get something out of this clusterfuck.) And now that I think about it, my clothes have been fitting looser than they used to, and maybe I finally at least have one thing I wanted. I made fun of Sara when she tried to sell me on this stuff, but you know what? It works. It feels good. I don’t count that exchange with the bartender as the sexiest I’ve ever had, but it was certainly a compliment.

  Y’know. Sort of.

  And now an idea crosses my mind. There’s a vintage clothing store next-door to this place. Maybe I could go in there and find something that fits my body a little better. Wear it in here, see what kind of attention I get. It might be fun.

  Nah, that’s stupid.

  It’s stupid, but it does sound fun, and with each ring on the side of my glass, it seems like a better idea. And finally, head swimming with suds, I slam the empty thing down and say thanks with a 20, and half-walk-half-stumble out the front door. I think the bartender was right, that my lower bodyweight makes me more susceptible, and the fact that I haven’t eaten anything in days doesn’t help either. And also, who knows what sort of drug/alcohol interactions I’m experiencing. Who knows. But this makes sense, it’s a good idea. I’ll need clothes anyway, I can’t just wear sweats every day, and I might as well have something that fits my body, my new body. It’s a good body, it’s fun to have a body that people pay attention to, and maybe it was worth it, even.