The Office of Historical Corrections Page 4
Rena pressed herself against the emptiness, flirted with cliché: nights fucking strangers against alleyway walls, waking to bruises in places she didn’t remember being grabbed. Though it had been almost a year of this by the time her sister was shot, her friends were happy to make retroactive excuses, to save themselves the trouble of an intervention that might only have been an intervention against a person being herself. So, more rough strangers, years she let make her mean. If she was not good enough for the thing other people had, who could be; if she did not deserve love, who should have it; if she could not find in a mirror what was so bad and unlovable in her, she would have to create it. She learned how to press the blade of her heart into the center of someone else’s life, to palm a man’s crotch under the table while smiling sweetly at his wife, to think, sometimes, concretely and deliberately, of her sister, punished for a thing she hadn’t done, while raising an eyebrow in a bar and accepting a drink from a man who didn’t bother hiding his ring. All the things she was getting away with! All the people who couldn’t see beauty or danger when it was looking right at them, when it had adjusted itself and walked out of their upstairs bathroom after tucking their husband’s penis back into his boxers, when it was under the hotel bedcovers while their boyfriend checked in on video chat. It was, if she is honest with herself, only because the circumstances were so strange that she didn’t sleep with JT, that she didn’t, one of those nights they woke up together, look him in the eyes and part her lips and trail her fingers down his bare chest and wait for what came next. It hadn’t been knowing Dori existed that kept her from it.
Rena thought for years that the meanness in her would be hers forever, except first, the hard, mean thing about her started to sparkle; she began to advertise trouble in a way that made her the kind of woman friends did not leave alone with their boyfriends. Then the rage she’d spent a decade fucking to a point softened into a kind of compassion. Men seemed more fragile to her now, and because it was impossible to entirely hate something for being broken, she forgave even those men who’d left her teary eyed and begging for their damage. No wonder they had sent her off—who wants to be loved for the hole in their chest when there is a woman somewhere willing to lie and say she can fix it, another prepared to spend decades pretending it isn’t there? She was, she wanted to tell everybody, so full of forgiveness lately, for herself and for everyone else. Her heart, these days, was a mewling kitten, apt to run off after anyone who would feed it, but try telling that to anyone who had known her the last decade, to anyone who had lived through all of her tiger years and wouldn’t hold a palm out to her without wanting the chance to be destroyed. It was a lovely daydream Dori was having for her, but if Rena went to Michael’s door speaking of her kitten heart, he would only hear kitten, he would only think pussy.
* * *
• • •
The awkward conversation fades into the comfort of nineties pop—God bless XM radio, the mercy of Dori changing the station before Billie broke open what was left of their hearts. Songs they have forgotten but now remember loving keep them company as they press through the landscape of rest stops and coffee shops and chain restaurants, slightly above the speed limit, so that things look even more alike than they might otherwise. By a little after ten they are at the edge of Indiana and Dori needs to pee, so they pull over at a rest stop off the turnpike. Rena follows her into the travel plaza to buy a bottled water and a packet of ibuprofen, her mouth still dry and her head faintly pulsing. The warm smell of grease activates her hangover, and by the time Dori exits the ladies’ room, Rena is grabbing breakfast at the McDonald’s counter.
There must be some law that any chain in an airport or rest stop is required to be just slightly off brand: Rena’s hash browns taste congealed and suspiciously like grape soda, and her breakfast sandwich is dry and slightly oblong. Dori has a Coke and a sad parfait, which is so sad that she has downed the Coke before making it more than a few spoonfuls into breakfast. When she gets up to refill the soda, she walks by a man a few tables away, hunched over his own pitiful breakfast, the bottom of his gray beard dotted with a drip of coffee he doesn’t seem to have noticed. His face breaks into a full smile as Dori walks by, and on her way back he calls, “Who’s the lucky man?”
Dori freezes. For a moment her grip on the soda is so shaky it seems clear that she will drop it, that she will stain the offending bride T-shirt beyond wearability, which will at least solve the problem of future commentary. But she keeps the soda in hand and composes herself as she turns back to the man with the beard, who has dabbed off the coffee with a napkin while waiting for her reply.
“All of Toledo,” she says with a smile.
“Huh?”
“Bride’s our band name. I’m the drummer. Show tonight.”
“Yeah?” he says. His smile is still just as affable and natural; it is not the wedding that excited him but the chance to congratulate a stranger’s happiness, and this endears him to Rena. She walks over to join the conversation Dori and the stranger have started regarding the imaginary band. He was in a band in college. The band was called Cold Supper. His name, fittingly, is Ernest.
“We never made it so far as the tour part,” Ernest says. “Got out of the garage at least, played a few local shows. But never the road.”
“Believe me, the glamour of the road life doesn’t stop,” says Rena, holding up the soggy second half of her sandwich.
Ernest smiles and pulls out a phone to show them a picture one of his old bandmates posted a few months earlier. A younger, skinny, and long-haired version of himself plays the guitar. He has not played in years, ten or fifteen, but he has a lucky pick in his wallet, which he shows them too. It is smooth to the touch and dips in where his thumb has pressed against it and has faded to the yellow of a smoker’s teeth. Ernest insists on an autograph on the way out, promises to tell his niece in Toledo about their made-up show in a made-up bar, and so they provide him the autograph on a paper napkin, renaming themselves Glory and Tina. He waves them good luck on their way out. Rena flushes with shame. Ernest and his earnestness, his guitar pick, his poor niece in Toledo.
In the car Rena can’t bring herself to close her door or click her seat belt, even as Dori starts the engine and the bells ding.
“I have to tell you something,” she says. “I have no idea where JT went. I made the cabin thing up.”
Dori is giddy with guilt and exhilaration from the life they made up inside. It takes a minute for her face to catch up with her feeling, for her eyes to go startled and her delicate features to scrunch together.
“You made it up?” she says. “What the hell address did you give me?”
“My sister’s old house.”
“Who lives there now?”
“Some people who sued their realtor because they didn’t know when they bought the place that someone was shot there.”
“Who was shot there?”
“My sister. By her husband. Two days before her first wedding anniversary. She’s alive. She can’t talk. Or maybe she can now. I don’t visit.”
“So this is your fucked-up cautionary tale? It’s a good thing JT left me now because if he hadn’t he would shoot me when he got sick of me?”
“I wasn’t thinking that. I wasn’t thinking anything, and I said the first thing that came to mind.”
“The house where your sister got shot was the first thing that came to mind when I asked if you knew where my fiancé was?”
“It’s always the first thing that comes to mind,” Rena says, and she is too relieved by the honesty to be ashamed.
* * *
• • •
Dori pulls the car out of the rest stop lot and Rena prepares for the long silence on the way back. Dori will be too proud and polite to say what happened; she will only say they didn’t find him. She will send guests home with tulle-wrapped almonds and be front and center at her father’s sermon Su
nday, by which point Rena will be on a plane home, home being a city she hasn’t yet lived in, two weeks in a short-term sublet while she looks for a real rental, her belongings in a pod making their way across the ocean. But two exits later and many exits too early for that future, Dori gets off the highway. Rena isn’t sure which set of signs they are following until they get there.
Waterworld. As advertised in highway billboards, except the billboards make it look giant and fluorescent, while in person it is somewhat sadder, a slide pool in one direction, a wave pool in another, and off to the side, vendors and a carnival stage with no show in progress. It is fifteen dollars to get in, but the real cash cow is the entryway gift shop, where now that they are here Rena supposes it would be rude not to buy a bathing suit. Dori buys a pink suit and a pair of blue Waterworld sweats. She is luminous. It is the first time all weekend Rena has seen her in real color.
“I’m sorry,” Rena says, which she realizes only then that she didn’t say earlier. Dori doesn’t answer, and Rena follows her poolside, where they lock their phones in electric blue lockers with the paint scratched and peeling. king sum, someone has carved into theirs, and there is no explanation or response. On the other side of the lockers, there is a whole tangle of slides, the tallest of which has a long line, but it is the one Dori wants, and so they wait.
In order to go down the slide you must first go up, and halfway through their waiting they have come to an uncertain staircase, alarmingly slippery in places, spiraled and winding around a cylinder. The higher they go, the more Rena feels something like fear. Once she spent some time in Mexico, in the city where Edward James built unfinished or intentionally incomplete sculptures in the middle of a series of waterfalls: stairs leading nowhere, a lack of clarity about what was nature and what was built, a wildly unsafe tourist trap. This staircase should feel safer but does not, and by the time they reach the top Rena is giddy with relief at the thought of going back down. She seats herself at the start of the slide with something like genuine joy.
It is a fast ride to the pool below. At the third turn is a waterproof camera, the kind that projects the photo down to a booth where the operator will offer to print and frame it and sell it to you at an outrageous markup. Dori and Rena are riding together, two to a tube, down through a series of sharp turns, sprayed with water that seems to be coming from every direction, and then dropped into the pool, which stings first with impact and again with chlorine. Rena surfaces with an unexpected lightness, which she sees mirrored in Dori’s smile. It occurs to her this might be the least terrible idea anyone involved in this alleged wedding has had in the last forty-eight hours.
Dori insists on checking out their picture after they towel off, so she heads for the photographer while Rena retrieves their phones.
Rena has three texts from Michael:
Did I do something wrong last night?
Did you kidnap the bride?!
Hey, I don’t know what’s up, but get your perfect ass back here—there’s an open bar waiting for us.
There are five texts from JT:
Where did you guys go?
Why did you think I was in Ohio?
Tell her I’m here.
Tell her I’m sorry.
Wedding is on! Where are you?
Wedding is on! JT has doubled back after all. He has come back to the place where whatever his decision is, it always stands. When Dori makes her way to the lockers, Rena hands her the phone. For a minute Dori’s face is soft. She reaches for her own phone and reads through whatever amended case JT has made for himself there. She tugs on a strand of her wet hair. Then she turns to Rena and shrugs, turns the phone off, and shoves it back into the locker. She holds out to Rena the photo of the two of them. Dori’s hair is whipping behind her, her smile open-mouthed and angled away. Rena is behind her, staring at the camera, laughing and startled. Dori has chosen a hideous purple-and-green airbrushed paper frame reading Wish You Were Here.
“This is going to be hilarious someday,” Dori says. “I hope.”
Rena stashes her phone in the locker with Dori’s. There is still nothing at the carnival stage, and so they share cheese fries and cotton candy and make their way to the wave pool, where they rent inner tubes. Rena floats and thinks of the last time she did this, which must have been twenty years ago, must have been with her family when this was the kind of day trip they would have all found relaxing. When Rena would not have looked at the water and thought of E. coli, of hantavirus, of imminent drought, of a recent news story of a child who drowned in a pool like this because his parents sent him to the water park alone for free day care and no one there was watching for him. When it was still her job to keep Elizabeth’s swimmies on, when there was still Elizabeth’s laugh, when there were still seas to be crossed, when the whole world was in front of her. Wish you were here. Wish you were here. Wish you were here.
Boys Go to Jupiter
The bikini isn’t even Claire’s thing. Before this winter, if you had said Confederate flag, Claire would have thought of high school beach trips: rows and rows of tacky souvenir shops along the Ocean City Boardwalk, her best friend, Angela, muttering They know they lost, right? while Claire tried to remember which side of the Mason-Dixon line Maryland was on. The flag stuff is Jackson’s, and she’s mostly seeing Jackson to piss off Puppy. Puppy, Claire’s almost stepmother, is legally named Poppy; Puppy is supposedly a childhood nickname stemming from a baby sister’s mispronunciation, but Claire suspects that Puppy has made the whole thing up. Puppy deemed it wasteful to pay twice as much for a direct flight in order for Claire to avoid a layover, and her father listens to Puppy now, so for the first half of her trip, Claire had to go in the wrong direction—from Vermont to Florida via Detroit.
Jackson has a drawl and a pickup truck and, in spite of his lack of farming experience, a farmer’s tan. Claire meets him at Burger Boy, the restaurant a few miles from her father’s house. Its chipping red-and-white tiles and musk of grease give it all the glamour of a truck stop bathroom, but it’s a respite from the lemon-scented and pristine house that brought her father to St. Petersburg for retirement. At college, Claire mostly lives off of the salad bar, but here she picks up a burger and fries to go every afternoon. It is the kind of food Puppy says she can’t eat since she turned thirty, and Puppy, having no job and, from what Claire gathers, limited ambitions beyond strolling the house in expensive loungewear, is always home to miserably watch her eat it. On her fourth Burger Boy visit, Claire picks up Jackson too. They get high and make out in the pool house that afternoon, and the next and the next and the next.
At nineteen, Jackson is six months older than Claire but still a senior in high school. They try hanging out at his house once, but Claire feels shamed by his mother’s scrutiny, assumes she wants to know what’s damaged or defective about Claire that has her screwing a high school boy. After that, when they cannot be alone at her house because her father is home (rarely) or Puppy is unbearable (frequently), they find places to park. He gives her the bikini at the end of the first week, after she complains that her father’s move to Florida caught her off guard—she is used to winters that at least make an effort to be winter, but her father’s new life in St. Pete is relentless sunshine, sunburn weather in December. Outside, by the pool, she has resigned herself to wearing T-shirts over one of Puppy’s old suits, which is spangled with faded glitter and sags over Claire’s bee-sting breasts. Jackson presents the bathing suit wadded up in a supermarket plastic bag, the sort of awkward non-gift you give someone in an awkward non-relationship—he bought it for five dollars on a spring break trip, he says, for a girlfriend he subsequently found blowing one of his friends in their shared motel room.
It isn’t much—three triangles and some string—but the tag is still attached, and Jackson is beaming at her.
“You’d look so hot in this,” he says.
She does look pretty hot: like someone sh
e is not, what with the stars and bars marking her tits and crotch, but like a hot someone she is not.
“You look like white trash,” Puppy says to her the first time she sees the bikini.
“You would know,” Claire says back. The bathing suit becomes a habit, even after the temperature dips. Two days before she leaves town, she throws a pair of cutoffs and a T-shirt over it before she and Jackson leave the house, but when they get to the parking space—a clearing in a half-built, abandoned subdivision—she makes a show of stripping off the shorts and shirt. In the few minutes before he takes it off and fucks her in the truck’s cab, Jackson snaps a picture of Claire, radiant and smiling and leaning against the crisp foil-flash of the bumper, the bikini’s Xs making her body a tic-tac-toe board.
She’s already forgotten about the picture when Jackson posts it on Facebook that night, tagged with her name and #mygirl. Claire doesn’t have the heart to object. On her last night in town she doesn’t even see Jackson—her father takes her out for a fancy dinner along the waterfront, just her, and then it’s goodbye. At the gate awaiting her connecting flight, Claire drapes herself over two airport chairs and checks the messages on her phone. She has eighteen new texts, most from casual acquaintances, the closest thing she has to friends at Dennis College. The messages range from hostile to bewildered, and it takes her a few minutes to decipher what has prompted them: a tweet from the account of the Black girl who lives across the hall from her, which features the photo of Claire in the bikini and the commentary “My hallmate just posted this picture of herself on vacation .”