It was Thanksgiving morning, 1982.
Back then, on the southwest side of Chicago, it was always overcast in November, grayish-white clouds gestating, sometimes delivering snow on that fourth Thursday of the month, but usually just looming, threatening.
Denise and I were the only ones at the park. We sat on the cold rubber seats of the old swing set. Feet off the ground and suspended by chains, we swayed toward each other and then away, the fog we breathed mingling before disappearing. I was a senior in high school, Denise was a junior. My mother was still busy preparing the holiday feast, and I assumed Denise’s was, too, especially since she was the second youngest of thirteen. There were so many kids, they probably didn’t even realize she wasn’t there helping.
We’d been dating since Halloween. She’d dressed up as a member of Devo, wearing a large Hefty garbage bag and an upside-down plastic flowerpot on her head. I’d dressed as Chuck Mangione, wearing a shiny red disco jacket and a fedora I’d found at a yard sale. I held a sign asking if anyone had seen my flugelhorn. Denise was the only person at the party who guessed who I was, and I immediately wanted her to be my girlfriend because of that. She understood me. She got me.
Three weeks later, alone in the park, I reached out to hold her mittened hand, but she smiled and gripped the swing’s chains instead, spinning herself around and around until the chain wouldn’t turn anymore.
“Here goes anything,” she said and raised her feet from the ground, spinning slowly at first, then faster and faster until she turned into a blur. I laughed at how ludicrously fast she spun, her hair brushing against me with each revolution.
When she finally stopped spinning, I reached out to steady her, but she leaned back and, in a froggy voice, said, “Hey, Buster! Whatcha think you’re doing?”
I laughed and said, “Hey, that’s pretty good. You sound like that fat guy in My Man Godfrey. I can’t remember his name.”
I watched a lot of old black-and-white movies on WGN and WFLD, and I took pride in the knowledge I’d accumulated over the years. Starting when I was ten, I kept lists of all the movies I had seen, the years the movies were released, and who starred in them. Each week when my parents came home with the Sunday edition of the Sun-Times, I rushed over, extracted the local TV guide, and circled all the movies I wanted to watch. My favorites were from the 1930s and 1940s. The fact that Denise could so accurately imitate a voice of a relatively obscure character actor further cemented the fact that she and I were meant to be together.
“Call me fat again, and I’ll sock you in the nose!” she said. She balled up her mittened fist and convincingly shook it in front of my face.
I balled up my own fist and said, “Why, I oughta…” I let the threat linger, same as Moe Howard whenever he threatened his fellow Stooges.
I smiled and lowered my fist, breaking character.
I said, “What do you want to do now? We’ve got a couple of hours before the turkey’s ready.”
I was hoping we could find some place private to kiss. I had never kissed a girl as much as I had kissed Denise, and it was all I thought about. Maybe the two of us could squeeze inside the enclosed slide and make out since no one was in the park. Making out was the foundation upon which our relationship was built, dating all the way back to that Halloween party when we shut ourselves inside a closet and kissed for hours. Should someone have opened the door, they’d have found a member of Devo and Chuck Mangione locked in a passionate embrace.
“Well?” I said now, eyebrows raised, imploring—hopeful.
In her froggy voice, she said, “You sure do have some peculiar notions.”
I smiled. I was starting to feel uneasy.
“But, no, seriously,” I said. “We’ve got only a couple of hours.”
“I don’t know who you think I am,” she croaked, “but I’m not into any funny business.”
Her shtick had run its course. The temperature was dropping, and I shivered on the swing from just sitting there. I needed to do something to warm up.
“Okay,” I said. “You can stop now.”
“Stop what, fella?” she said in her new voice.
“This,” I said. “Whatever you’re doing.”
She started laughing. It was a loud, cynical laugh. She was still in character. In fact, she seemed to be digging in, finding new depths. “You should see the look on your face!” she said, pointing at me. “What a palooka!”
“All right,” I said. “I’m leaving.”
“Don’t let the barn door hit you on the way out!”
“I’m serious,” I said. “I’m going home.”
“Well, la-di-da,” she said.
I slid off the swing’s seat and got on my bike. Before leaving, I stared at Denise, expecting her to drop the act, but she leaned forward and said, “What’re you waiting for? An invitation?”
I suddenly, inexplicably wanted to cry. My eyes were already wet from the increasingly cold wind, my face numb. I biked away without looking back.
After Thanksgiving dinner, the phone rang.
“It’s for you!” my father yelled even though we were only a dozen feet apart. A football game was on TV, and the room looked like the scene of a massacre. Everywhere you turned were plates piled high with bones and cloth napkins stained red from cranberry sauce. My mother occasionally clutched her stomach and moaned. Without moving any other part of his body, my dad stretched his arm out toward me, like a dying man handing me a valuable heirloom, but it was only the phone’s receiver.
“Hello?” I said. “And to whom am I speaking?” I had assumed it was Denise calling to apologize, so I adopted a business-like demeanor. I wasn’t going to make it easy for her. But it wasn’t Denise. It was some guy. An adult.
“What’d you do to her?”
“Who?”
“Denise. My daughter. Who else?”
“I didn’t do anything to her.”
At this, my father cut his eyes from the TV to me. I was disappointing him in his final hours. But then someone scored a touchdown, and he looked back at the TV.
“Why’s she talking like that?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess we both like obscure actors from old movies. But this was news to me.”
“Are you being a smart ass?”
“No, sir.”
“You better not be. I don’t have patience for smart-ass kids.”
“Okay.”
There was a pause. Then the line went dead.
“Hello?” I said. “Hello? Anybody there?”
I handed the receiver back to my father, who settled it into place. The cord that connected the phone to the wall was so long we could have carried it outside, all the way down to the mailbox, but my father just kept it next to him, like a loyal dog. I sometimes caught him petting it.
He said, “Are you in trouble?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Well, keep it that way,” he said.
After a long, tryptophan-induced nap, I rode my bike to Denise’s house. It was already dark out, and the wind was whipping around a light dusting of snow, causing the street to look eerily alive.
When I reached Denise’s, I parked my bike and knocked at the back door. Denise answered. The stoop had a porch light, but the bulb was yellow, causing me to squint. It didn’t help that my eyeballs were still cold and wet from the ride over. When I squinted, I could tell she was smiling, but I couldn’t read her eyes.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
She stepped out of the house, pulling the door almost shut but not entirely. She bit her bottom lip and looked me up and down. “Now it is,” she said.
Denise and I had only ever kissed. I’d never seen her like this. She was looking at me in a way that I had fantasized women might one day look at me, but now that Denise was looking at me this way, I became shy. I also worried that this would anger her father even more than her funny voice routine.
She reached up and, with her forefinger, played with one of my earlobes. I had earlobes that dangled, and she started rubbing the bottom of it, that obscene droop of flesh beneath my earhole. She rubbed it gently at first, then a bit faster. She shut her eyes and made a noise, a quick intake of breath, and then she rubbed it more vigorously. “Oh God,” she said. She shivered and jerked her finger away from the lobe. She shivered one more time then opened her eyes and said, “Holy shit. I need a cigarette. You got one?”
“You smoke?” I asked.
“Only after I…you know.”
I didn’t know.
In the distance, from somewhere inside the house, I heard the voice of an old-time character actor: “Who’s at the door, Buster?”
I squinted at the girl in front of me. There was something slightly off about her mouth. And her left eye never fully opened. What I had excused as distortions from the yellow glow of the porch light were actual physical differences. This wasn’t Denise in front of me. I had been standing outside with one of her sisters. There were thirteen kids total, and at least four looked alike. I had joked once that I couldn’t have picked Denise out of a lineup of her own family.
“That stupid voice,” Denise’s sister said. “It’s driving all of us crazy.”
“Which sister are you again?” I asked.
“I’m Mary, silly,” she said and punched my shoulder. I bruised easily and expected to see some damage in the morning.
“You’re home from college?” I asked.
“Uhhhhhh, it’s Thanksgiving? Hello? Denise said you were cute but not too bright.”
“She said that?”
“Or maybe I just said that so you’ll stop liking her and start liking me.” She reached up for my earlobe again but then jerked her hand back. “Control yourself, Mary,” she said to herself.
“Why’s Denise talking like that?” I asked.
Mary shrugged. “Dad thinks you did something to her. He keeps saying he’s going to kill you if he ever sees you.”
“Maybe I should go then.”
“Maybe.” She leaned toward me and said, “And don’t tell Denise what we did together or she’ll kill both of us.”
“But we didn’t do anything together,” I said.
“Says you,” she said. “I like you. You’re cute.” She kissed me on the lips, briefly stuck her tongue inside my mouth and moved it around, and then stepped back inside the house, shutting the door between us.
I was more confused now than when I had arrived, so I got on my bike and sat there, waiting, expecting someone else to come to the door, maybe her father with a hammer, but when I heard the froggy voice again—“Hey! Whoever ate all the yams is gonna get a fist to the kisser!”—I stood up on my bike’s pedals and took flight, slipping and sliding all the way home across an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of swirling snow.
I avoided Denise for the rest of my senior year, or maybe she avoided me, and by the time next fall had rolled around, I was a freshman at the university downstate, two hours from home, majoring in Mass Communications, mostly because I liked watching movies, even though the major offered only one such course: Introduction to Film Studies. We watched movies by Ingmar Bergman and Jean-Luc Godard, and I felt more sophisticated for having seen them while standing against the wall of a house kegger with a giant poster of U2’s Boy album cover hanging next to my head. I wore skinny ties to parties and shirts with collars that buttoned, and though I was lonely that semester, I also felt exhilarated by being somewhere other than my parents’ house. I had thought I might miss my ten-speed or my beer can collection or the sole copy of Playboy that I had purchased at Kroch’s and Brentano’s downtown, hiding it among a stack of costly magazines, like American Cinematographer and Film Quarterly – but I missed none of it. The optimism I felt toward my future, I would realize many years later, would never be greater than it was that semester. I was at peak optimism.
The week before Thanksgiving, it rained. The temperature dropped as night came, and everything in the city froze over. I went outside to take photos of the ice-encased trees, but I slipped while crossing the street, and I slid partway down the street’s incline, stopping only after grabbing the bumper of a parked car. The car was running, and I started getting lightheaded from sucking in, against my wishes, the tailpipe’s exhaust. I had read Death of a Salesman and knew this was a good way to die.
The car door opened, and a girl about my age leaned out.
“You okay?”
“Denise?” I said.
“No,” she said. “Mary. Here, grab my hand.” She pulled me up toward her open door. I slid the whole way.
“Don’t let go,” she said as she moved over behind the steering wheel. “Get in,” she ordered, and I clawed my way into her car. My camera lens, I realized, was broken.
Mary cocked her head. “Do we know each other?”
“I used to date your sister,” I said. “I stopped over last Thanksgiving, and you…”
Before I could finish, she reached out and took hold of my earlobe. Instead of rubbing it, she tugged it a few times.
“I remember,” she said. “Wow. That’s crazy. What are the chances?”
She let go of my lobe.
“Right?” I said. “I know.”
“You go to school here?” she asked.
“I do,” I said. “How’s Denise?”
Mary sounded like I had just punctured her. She sighed for a really long time and then crumpled back against the door behind her, sliding down until her head was level with the steering wheel.
“We had to have her locked up,” Mary said.
“What do you mean…locked up? Like Frances Farmer?”
“Frances Farmer? Who’s that? Did we go to school with her?”
I shook my head. It wasn’t important, but I was surprised she hadn’t seen the movie starring Jessica Lange about the Hollywood actress from the 1930s who was involuntarily locked up and given shock therapy.
“She kept talking in that weird voice. She wouldn’t stop. So Dad took her to Cook County.” When I waited for more, she leaned toward me and said, “The looney bin.”
“Oh.”
“Here. Listen to this.”
She found a cassette tape and shoved it into the player. It was Denise talking in the froggy voice, but her tone was more ominous, no longer the voice of a fat comic actor from fifty years ago. She sounded more like Linda Blair in The Exorcist now.
I’m going to kill him, the voice said. I’m going to crawl through his window while he sleeps and slit his throat.
I reached up and pushed the eject button.
“Creepy,” I said.
“As you see,” Mary said, “we had no choice.”
She reached up and touched my earlobe again, gentler this time.
“I thought about you after that night,” she said. “Did you think about me?”
“I did,” I said, and I wasn’t lying. I wondered how I had mistaken her for Denise and why she had done what she had done. And yet, despite these mysteries, I slotted her into a kind of slide projector of fantasies I kept for nighttime, rotating through the memories until I landed on one that would do the trick. I found myself landing on my night with Mary more nights than not.
She leaned toward me and kissed me. I felt like we were in the opposite of a snow globe, safely sealed from the beautiful but dangerous world around us.
We kissed and kissed, and then Mary sat sideways on my lap.
“There’s music on after this,” she said and pushed the cassette tape back into the player.
Mary’s tongue was warmer than my tongue. She slid it around my mouth as she had done last year. From the car’s speakers, Denise said, I’m going to cut off his penis while he sleeps and bury it in a cemetery.
“Who’s she talking about?” I breathed into Mary’s ear.
“You,” Mary said
Oh, I thought.
Mary rubbed her face against mine until our mouths touched again. Denise’s voice abruptly cut off and the song “In a Big Country” by Big Country began.
“Want to be my boyfriend?” Mary whispered.
“Sure,” I said.
Mary grabbed onto both of my ears and pulled me toward her until our faces mashed against each other’s.
“I’m not my sister,” she said. “I’m not Denise. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
She playfully bit my nose and said, “This is going to be fun.”
“I hope so,” I said.
By morning the ice had melted, and Mary offered to drive me back home for Thanksgiving.
“No sense both of us driving,” she said. “It’s a waste of gas.”
I agreed. I was still traumatized by the 1979 gas shortage, not so much because of the shortage of a natural resource but because of my father’s reaction to the long lines and how, for years after it had ended, he wouldn’t stop talking about it.
“Please, Bob,” my mother would beg whenever she had reached her limit. “Just stop.”
“Oh!” my father would say, surprised by the pushback. And then he would become morose, like a man who had finally opened up about his most horrific wartime experiences only to be told no one was interested.
Two hours later, Mary dropped me off in front of my house, promising to call me. I dreaded going inside. Even though I had been away only a few months, I already felt like a different person. I expected my parents to be irritated by my return, suspicious about who had driven me home, and disappointed to learn that they were spending money for me to watch foreign movies and then write essays with titles like “Existentialism in Risky Business” and “A Freudian Interpretation of Octopussy.” But when I opened the door and walked into the house, my mother rushed over from the stove and, still wearing her oven mitts, cupped my face and stared at me. Her eyes were wet from joy. My father willingly extracted himself from whatever game was on so that he could witness this heartwarming scene, after which he wrapped both arms around me and said, “Your mother’s been looking forward to this day for months,” and when I leaned back, I saw that his eyes were glassy, too.
“C’mon, kiddo,” he said, leading me into the living room. “It’s the fourth quarter. It’s been a hell of a game.”
After our meal, after our naps on our respective sofas and Barcaloungers, the phone rang.
My father answered. To me, he said, “It’s a girl.” He raised his eyebrows and grinned while my mother adjusted her head to better zero in on the conversation. Without my coat, I took the phone outside and walked as far as the cord would stretch.
“Mary?” I said.
“Who else would it be?” Mary said.
“I don’t know. I have friends,” I lied.
“Easy,” Mary said. “I’m teasing you. Hey, listen. Mom put together a plate for Denise, so we’re going to bring it to her.”
“Okay,” I said. “Be safe. The roads are starting to get slick.”
“What? No. You and I are going.”
I didn’t say anything. It had been a year since I’d seen Denise. And I was the last person to see her speak in a normal voice. Furthermore, there was her threat of cutting off my penis and burying it in a cemetery.
Why a cemetery?
“Hell-o!” Mary said.
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll be waiting in front of my house.”
“That’s more like it,” Mary said. “See you soon, loverboy.”
Mary and I somberly carried the plates into the county hospital. It was a dark, grim building, like something you’d see in The Hunchback of Notre Dame starring Charles Laughton. At the reception desk, Mary told the woman who we were there to see.
“She’s my sister,” Mary said. “And this is her fiancé,” she added, motioning to me.
The woman behind the counter eyed us with suspicion.
“Fiancé, is it?” she asked me.
I nodded.
I said, “She started acting this way the day I proposed to her.”
“Well, you’re a real catch then, aren’t you?” she said.
I shrugged.
“We brought her food,” Mary said.
“Sorry to say, but you wasted your time,” the woman said. “She’s not here anymore.”
“What do you mean she’s not here anymore?” Mary asked.
The woman said, “She escaped. It happens. More than you’d think. This isn’t exactly Fort Knox.”
“Escaped?”
The woman nodded. She leaned forward and said in a low voice, “I’d never put anyone I cared about here. That’s the truth.”
Mary looked around until she spotted a pay phone. She set the plate of food on the counter and dug through her purse. When she found enough change, she hustled to the phone. I followed her, still carrying the bounty of yams and cranberry sauce. Was I supposed to carry both plates? I knew there were more pressing concerns, but I couldn’t stop worrying about the other plate of food. That was the tragedy of my brain. I had difficulty separating the important from the trivial.
Mary plugged the phone with coins and dialed. After a few rings, I heard a metallic voice on the other end of the line.
Keeping her voice low, Mary said, “Make sure the doors and windows are locked.”
I heard a tinny why?
“Because she’s on the loose,” Mary said. “She’s coming for us.”
I looked over at the woman at the reception desk. She was eating a purloined block of cornbread from Denise’s plate. She stared right back at me, daring me to say something. When I turned around, Mary had already finished her call and was digging for more change.
“Better tell your parents to secure the house,” she said. “Until she’s caught, none of us are safe.”
I thought of my grandmother’s grave, where I had taken Denise on our second date. Was that where she had planned to bury my penis?
I set down my plate and held out my palms, accepting the rest of her coins. I remembered the joy my return had brought to my parents, and I felt sick to my stomach.
When I hesitated, Mary placed her palm on my back and said, “The path you resist, grasshopper, is the one you need.”
“Are you quoting Kung Fu?”
She ran her finger across the bottom of my earlobe and said, “I’ll make it up to you. I promise.” She stood on her toes, leaned her head back, and flicked the lobe with her tongue. The receptionist, still watching, removed the tinfoil from the plate at this gesture, picked up a turkey leg, and bit into it without fear of consequences. All bets were off.
“All right,” I said.
I made the call.
Thanksgiving Day came and went without any murders or body parts sliced off and buried, but the warmth my parents had exhibited upon my arrival never returned after my phone call from the county hospital.
The next night, while in my bedroom, I was certain Denise had broken into our house and was holding my parents hostage, but when I carefully made my way downstairs, bowling trophy in hand to club her over the head if need be, I saw it was just an old movie on TV, The Lady Eve, starring Eugene Pallette, the actor whose voice Denise had uncannily imitated.
My father looked up at me. “You taking that back to your dorm?” he asked, pointing at my trophy with his cigarette.
“Maybe,” I said.
I thought about Denise in her Devo costume and how much I had loved her. And here I was now, only thirteen months later, worried that I might need to bash in her head. I set the trophy down next to my dad’s ashtray.
“Look. Don’t take this the wrong way, but…your mom and I don’t like your new girlfriend,” he said.
“You haven’t met her,” I said.
“Even so,” Dad said, “we think she’s trouble.”
I shrugged. “She’s all right.”
“Do what you want,” Dad said. “It’s your funeral.” He took a long drag from his cigarette before pivoting back to the TV.
I hadn’t heard anything from Mary since Thanksgiving Day, but when Saturday rolled around, she was parked outside my parents’ house and honking her horn. It was time to go back to school.
“See you,” I said to my parents, who barely acknowledged me. I was cursed, and they knew it.
The drive back was quiet – no talking, no music. The cassette with Denise’s creepy voice sat half-in-half-out of the player, tempting me to push it in and listen again.
After an hour I said, “I guess it’s a good thing she didn’t kill anyone in your family.”
“You think?” Mary said and then shook her head. We were like an old married couple who were tired of each other’s company, despite our having been a couple for only four days.
Mary dropped me off, declining to come inside my dorm. She claimed she wanted to clean her house before her five roommates returned. It was the first I’d heard of her five roommates. Or the house. I realized I didn’t even know what her major was.
“What’s your major?” I asked before getting out of the car.
“Please,” she said. “Next you’ll be asking me what my sign is.”
“What’s your sign?” I had hoped she would smile, but she didn’t.
“Just go, okay?”
I slid out of the car, unsure if we were still a couple.
The dorms on campus didn’t officially open until Sunday, but I was able to get inside and take the elevator up to my room on the eleventh floor. The penthouse suite, my roommate called it. It was the only funny thing he had ever said. His name was Earl, and his father worked for International Harvester. He reminded me of Lennie in Of Mice and Men—a tall, strong lunkhead who might accidentally kill your cat while petting it. Earl spent most of each day washing his hands until they were pink and raw, and then he’d adjust his giant poster of Larry Bird, which did not need adjusting. “You think that’s crooked?” he would ask, and I would say, “No,” but he would adjust it anyway.
I was thrilled to have the room to myself, if only for a day. I sat on my bed with the door open. I lived on a co-ed floor, and I had crushes on at least six girls, and I wanted to start telling everyone that I had a girlfriend with the hope that the six girls, who had given me no attention, would start to desire me now that I was unattainable. That’s how the world worked, I was learning.
The first person to arrive was Zelda, the R.A. She never enforced any of the rules and spent the week partying in her private room with townies. They sometimes spent the night and used our communal shower in the morning. It was weird to see men ten years older than me stepping naked out of the shower. They had full beards and neck hair. Their hands were callused, and some were starting to get beer guts. Zelda, who was five foot tall and had acne, was an object of speculation among the freshmen girls who lived on my floor. They didn’t like her; they made fun of her pimples; they were repulsed by the townies that came and went. I liked Zelda because she smiled at me in a way that suggested she knew my darkest secrets.
When she noticed me in my room, she yelled down the hall, “How was your Thanksgiving?”
I yelled back, “I have a girlfriend!”
She grinned. There it was—her clairvoyance.
“Oh!” she said. “Before I forget.” She walked toward my room. I envied her confidence. I hoped she would keep walking until she was inside my room. I hoped she would shut the door and unclothe me with her teeth. But she stopped at the threshold and removed from a stack of letters in her hand a single envelope.
“This was sent to the wrong room,” she said. She raised her eyebrows and stared into my eyes.
When I reached for the letter, she quickly retracted her arm. Not once did she break eye contact.
“Aw, look at you,” she said. “You’re so young and innocent.” She examined the letter and said, “Who’s Denise?”
My heart, which was already beating hard, tightened.
Zelda said, “You don’t have to tell me. That’s okay. It’s good to have secrets.” She stepped closer, putting her hand on my arm. “If you want, I’ve got a bottle of Schnapps. I can go get it.”
I hesitated. I already knew I wasn’t going to refuse. Was this the kind of man I would become, someone who gave into temptation at its first offer?
“Unless you think this new girlfriend of yours would mind,” Zelda said. Her hand was moving up my arm now, until it reached the back of my neck.
“No, yeah,” I said. “It’s okay. You can bring it.” I shrugged. “I don’t think she’d mind.”
“Be right back,” she said. “Don’t go anywhere.” She gave me the once-over and said, “I knew you were my only cool resident.”
I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into. I had a flash of déjà vu, that I had felt similarly anxious before, and then I remembered the days after Thanksgiving last year, when I was still living at home and feeling out of sorts because of Denise’s inexplicable descent into madness, and I was feeling then as I did now, a swirling feeling, as though I were on an out-of-control carnival ride and everything was slipping from my hands. Nothing was working out as I had hoped. By the end of my life, I feared, I would be alone in this world.
While Zelda was away retrieving the schnapps, I opened the letter. That stationary featured a sleepy Garfield the Cat. He’s thinking, “I hate Mondays.” On the stationary was only one sentence: I’M INSIDE YOUR CLOSET.
“Jesus,” I said and stepped out into the hallway. I looked at the two closets, one on each side of the room. Each door was an accordion-like contraption made out of hard plastic that you pushed to the side to open.
Both were shut.
Was she watching me? If I opened one, was she going to jump out and stab me in the chest with a knife and then slice off my penis?
“What’s wrong?” Zelda asked. She was already back with the schnapps.
I showed her the letter.
Zelda sighed, walked inside my room, and reached for my roommate’s closet.
“Don’t!” I said.
She pushed it open. Denise wasn’t inside.
She turned around to face my closet.
“Please, no,” I said, but she ignored me and jerked it open. It, too, was empty.
“Holy shit,” I said and reached up to feel my racing heart.
“Girls are so melodramatic,” Zelda said. “That’s why I prefer boys. Here, come inside. You need this more than me.” She wiggled the bottle in her hand. “Oh, and shut the door behind you.”
I hesitated.
“You can do it,” Zelda said. “I would tell you that I don’t bite, but that’s not true.”
She smiled; I obeyed.
I lost my virginity that night on my roommate Earl’s bed. One minute, I was asking Zelda what she thought of François Truffaut’s work, in particular the theme of lost youth in The 400 Blows; the next, Zelda was naked and on top of me, whispering, “Just relax.” I was having difficulty relaxing because we were on Earl’s bed, and I kept imaging his giant overwashed hands clutching my throat and squeezing. At one point, Zelda shut her eyes and slammed her palm flat against the wall, but then she made a fist, crumpling the middle of Earl’s Larry Bird poster, holding on to it as though it were a rescue rope. Then she dragged her nails across Larry Bird’s leg, scratching the poster. What fascinated me was how unaware she was of the damage she was doing, utterly possessed, until she opened her eyes and looked down at me.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Don’t you like this?”
“I do,” I said. “It’s just that…” I motioned with my head toward the poster.
Still on top of me, she leaned sideways and reached for the bottle of schnapps and then took a swig. I admired her ability to multitask. When she set the bottle down, she leaned all the way forward until she was pressing against me. And then I heard her snoring. Not much later, I fell asleep, too.
In the morning, I woke alone and naked in a room that looked like a tornado had brushed up against it. The room smelled of schnapps and sex. Larry Bird still clung to the wall but barely.
Somehow—I couldn’t remember how—we had knocked over all the framed photos of Earl’s family on his desk. A shattered picture frame lay on the floor. Inside the frame was a photo of my roommate with a girl he had met at Christian Camp last summer. The photo had always depressed me: Earl’s square eyeglass frames, his thick yellow eyebrows, the way his pasty arms hung at his sides like two uncooked loaves of sourdough. It was a photo of a serial killer posing with his first victim.
The door creaked open. I expected it to be Earl, but it was Mary.
I quickly covered myself with Earl’s bedsheet.
She said, “It’s me, baby. I feel terrible how I treated you yesterday. You must hate me.”
She flipped on the light. She was holding a box from Dunkin’ Donuts. As she looked around the room, her expression changed from contrition to horror.
“What the hell’s going on here?” she asked.
“This?” I said, motioning to the wreckage. “I’m starting to think I walk in my sleep. It wasn’t like this last night.”
She sniffed the room.
“What’s that smell?” she asked. “It smells like sex in here.”
I shrugged. I made a noise suggesting that I didn’t know.
“Oh, look. Doughnuts!” I said. “Are those for me?” I forced a smile. I took a step toward Mary but slipped on something. I looked down and saw Zelda’s underwear under my shoe.
Mary, following my gaze, saw them, too. She was squinting at them for a better look.
“Are you kidding me?” she asked.
She turned and left, heading for the elevators. I quickly dressed. I ran through my head all the possible explanations, but none of them were credible. I brought Denise’s letter with me as I rushed down the hall, hoping to catch up to Mary, but she had already taken one of the two elevators down.
Several of my fellow dorm mates had already returned, and they looked at me with a newfound interest. I was not the same person they had seen only a few days earlier. I was disheveled, chasing a girl they didn’t know, running from a room that suggested some kind of as-yet-unknown-to-them hedonism.
When the next elevator opened, Earl stepped out with his mustard-colored hard-shell suitcase.
“Hey, you’re back!” He laughed his loud, booming laugh. His hands were even rawer, if that was possible. I was afraid to shake one, fearful I would injure him, fearful (if I were honest)
I would catch whatever he had and begin washing my hands with the same unnecessary vigor.
“I’ll explain everything later,” I said as we passed each other getting on and off the elevator. As the door started to slide shut, I said, “Don’t be mad.”
I saw his confusion a split-second before the elevator started to moan and grind.
Two floors below my floor, the elevator door opened.
“Shit!” I said because no one was there.
But then I heard what sounded like walkie-talkies. I heard someone crying. I saw someone run down a hallway.
I don’t know why, but I looked at the envelope in my hands. Why hadn’t it been placed in my mailbox? Why did Zelda have it?
The address was wrong. I lived on the seventeenth floor. Room 1753. The envelope was addressed to 1553.
The fifteenth floor.
I stepped off the elevator, turning sideways as the doors started to close, continuing its descent.
No, I thought, sensing what was wrong even before I rounded the corner, as though heading to my own room.
There were police and paramedics. A stretcher sat in the hallway. Three cops were pinning down a woman on the stretcher as two paramedics worked quickly to strap her down and tranquilize her. When the woman craned her head and saw me, she opened her mouth, as though to scream, but nothing came out.
It was Denise.
A cop blocked me from walking any closer. I hadn’t even noticed him standing there, so fixated as I was on the scene playing out beyond him.
When I stepped back, a boy I didn’t know said, “They found her in a closet.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“She had a gun, too,” he said. “But she was too weak to even lift it. She was practically dead, dude. No telling how long she’d been in there without food or water.”
“Really?” I said. “Almost dead?”
He said, “Imagine coming home from Thanksgiving, opening your closet, and seeing that.”
I turned to look at him. His face was shaped like a weasel’s.
“Dan,” he said, reaching out to shake my hand. I took his hand and told him my name.
“Hey, you going to the kegger tonight?” Dan asked. “It’s at the pancake house.”
I suddenly hated this guy I didn’t know. I wanted to knock him to the ground, get on top of him, and repeatedly slam my fist into his stupid face. I said, “Pancake house? Tell me more.”
“You haven’t been? Yeah, man, they call it the pancake house because they cooked a bunch of pancakes, left them out until they hardened, and then nailed them to the walls. These guys are mental. You should come.”
“Sounds cool,” I said. “Sure. I’ll go.”
As the stretcher was pushed past me, Denise kept eye contact with me. She opened her mouth again to scream, but, once more, nothing came out.
“I think she likes you,” Dan said.
“I’m dating her sister,” I said, and Dan laughed.
“You should definitely come to the Pancake House,” he said. “Those guys are hilarious, too. And dark as fuck. Like you.”
Was I hilarious? Was I dark?
Maybe I was someone I had never imagined myself to be, and maybe this would be the persona I would cultivate for myself, hammering and chiseling away at it for the next four years until I became the embodiment of two seemingly contradictory personality traits.
I watched as the cops and paramedics pushed the stretcher into the stairwell. The elevators were too small, and we were fifteen floors up. They’d have to carry her all the way down.
No one was happy, except for Dan, who had found a new friend.
Mary and I never spoke again. Zelda pretended that nothing had happened between us. Earl found a new roommate on another floor, but after a few months of ignoring me, he began sitting with me again at the cafeteria, reminiscing about the few months we had been roommates, as though those had been the best months of his life.
“We had some good times, didn’t we?” he asked, laughing. The question was rhetorical, so I didn’t feel compelled to answer. Silently, I ate my bowl of chili and grilled cheese sandwich and stared at his impossibly pink hands.
I didn’t hear what had become of Denise. I didn’t want to know.
I floated through college in a haze of weed and hangovers and the occasional hook-up that I usually regretted in the morning. I was a solid B- student. I wasn’t, as I had once thought, anything special.
After college, I landed a job with the Southtown Economist, and I worked my way up to Classifieds Manager, running a team that sold “help wanted,” “real estate,” and “legal notice” ads. No one there watched Ingmar Bergman movies or wanted to talk about the French New Wave, and to be honest, neither did I anymore.
At my twentieth high school reunion, I asked around about Denise, and someone told me they heard she had died, but I never confirmed this information. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
Every few years, usually around Thanksgiving, I would hear her wrecked voice. I might be in a supermarket or restaurant or a highway rest stop, and the voice would come to me, plain as my own voice, but whenever I looked around, I could never find its source. I could never find Denise.
When the newspaper industry collapsed and the buyouts began, I waited until the last round before jumping ship. My problem was that I clung to hope longer than I should have. Or maybe my problem was just denial. I couldn’t believe all these years had come and gone as fast as they did.
I’m an old man now, and I live alone in a country that’s nine-thousand miles from where I grew up. I’m not anti-social, but I quit dating years ago. It’s taken sixty years to come to terms with the fact that every relationship requires more than I’m capable of giving.
Where I live now, it’s eighty-five degrees in late November. Rainy season has ended, and the sun is unrelenting. There are only two seasons here – wet and dry.
I buy Valium from a Chinese pharmacy near the Russian market. I’ll pop a couple, wash them down with fresh coconut juice, and then wander the maze of the narrow-aisled market in a blissful calm. The Valium makes me feel like I’m sinking and swimming at the same time. If I shut my eyes, I can sometimes swim all the way back to my overcast youth, those eternally gray skies, the patches of ice, the insatiable hunger I felt to touch my girlfriend, to kiss and hold her–and then, sinking, I’ll start to cry, not hard, not dramatically, just wet-eyed melancholy for the merciless way life sheds away the years, until one day you wake up old and unrecognizable, a body full of aches.
It’s been years since I thought I heard Denise’s voice. A few years ago, I started missing it. After all, nothing bad ever happened to me when I heard her. It was just a switch, the linchpin, a hallway into a memory of teen love and insatiable craving. As tuk-tuks and motor scooters whiz past, I listen for the stray croak, but I never hear her.
One night, as I come back to my apartment, the old security guard is wearing a winter coat with a scarf wrapped around his face.
“Cold,” he says to me.
It’s seventy-two degrees, and I’m wearing cargo shorts and a T-shirt.
“I grew up in the cold. Real cold. I miss it!”
He smiles and nods, though I know what I have said is lost on him.
“Goodnight, sir!” he says before I step into the elevator.
“Goodnight,” I say.
It’s not until I’m upstairs and look at the day’s news on my phone that I realize it’s Thanksgiving Day back in America. I’m thirteen hours ahead, so it’s only noon where I grew up.
I had loved Thanksgiving when I was a small child, spending the entire day between meals watching TV–the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, college football, and old movies. I would drift in and out of sleep on the couch as the already-gray sky darkened, our entire home lit only by the flickering television light, until my parents went to bed, leaving me alone to watch Miracle on 34th Street or Meet Me in St. Louis, movies that made me nostalgic for a time I had never experienced, mythological places that never existed except on film.
I still don’t know what had happened to Denise in the park that day.
Before the Valium wears off, I can see her next to me on the swing set, rotating herself with her feet on the ground until the chain can’t twist another revolution. She smiles at me, the last time she’ll ever be herself.
Here goes anything.
I have rheumatoid arthritis and move slowly, but I am happy to be where I am. I live in a country whose language and customs I’ll never understand. I’m a guest among people who would have every right not to trust strangers, and yet I’ve been treated with nothing but kindness.
I boil water and make a cup of tea, and then I bring it down to the guard.
“Here. It’ll warm you up,” I say.
He accepts the tea. He blows on it and takes a sip. He looks up at me, nods, and smiles.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” I say.
“Good evening, sir!” he says.
I press the button for the elevator and wait. The door slides open. As usual, the elevator is empty. In a building of over a hundred tenants, no one is ever inside. I have lived here for over two years. It’s a statistical improbability, but I’m always alone.