Look at You Now Page 4
• • • •
It was the first time in my life that the dark felt good to me. I wanted to stay under my coat forever. But I thought I heard something at the door. I pushed the coat off my face and sat up. I did hear something. The light was shining through the window, and there was a soft tapping. I held my breath to keep quiet, but the tapping turned into knocking, so I tiptoed in my socks over to the door and listened for a minute.
“Yes?” I said softly.
Through the door I heard, “You awake? It’s Alice; I work on the floor. If you’re hungry you can go to breakfast, but if you don’t go in the next half hour you’ll have to wait for lunch.” Alice was the resident supervisor, the lady who was there to help the girls, who Ms. Graham told me about yesterday. I put my hand on the door handle to make sure Alice didn’t come in. There was no lock.
“Um, thank you. I’m not hungry.” I was starving and feeling faint.
“Up to you,” she said. And then I heard her footsteps walk back down the hall.
I looked around the sparse, empty room and felt the walls staring down at me, accusing me, as though they knew what a terrible, tarnished person I was. No one needed to remind me of how much I’d dishonored my parents, or what a disgrace I was to anyone who might have ever known me; I was breathing that shame every second. It was like a suffocating black cloak wrapping itself around my body.
I trusted my parents completely. I always had, and I knew they weren’t cruel people; they were kind and sound, but they’d left me hundreds of miles away from home, alone and scared to death. I knew I was as bad as it could get, or else I wouldn’t be here. I was living with all the other soiled, damaged stray girls because that was the kind of girl I was. It was slowly sinking in: I was completely alone. For the first time in my life, I had no one, and nowhere to turn.
The tears dripped one after another onto my coat. It was like they were the last pieces of good left inside me, trying to remind me they were still there. I couldn’t stand the sight of myself in the bathroom mirror, so I turned the light off and waited in the dark for the shower to get warm. I stepped onto the cold tile as the hot water poured over me. I let the awful noise of the showerhead drown out the sounds of my sobbing. I wailed and wept a long time before I finally sat down on the tile and let the water beat me for as long as I could take it.
• • • •
“Mom?”
“Hi, sweetheart. Lizzie, are you there? Is something wrong?”
Suddenly I couldn’t talk. I’d made my way to the phone booth in the hall after finally venturing out of my room. But the second I heard my mom’s voice, the ball in the back of my throat got the tears going. I shut the door of the phone booth as hard as I could. It was many minutes before I could get myself calm enough to speak.
“I’m here, Mom.”
“Is everything okay, honey? What is it?”
“I just—I’m just—I can’t do this, I’m so scared… .”
“It has only been one night, Liz. You can do this. Can you try to be brave, honey?”
“I don’t know. Are Jennifer and Tory home? I, I want to talk to them.”
“They are, but you sound so … not well. I don’t want to scare them.” My stomach dropped. I just wanted to try and feel normal for a moment. I just wanted to feel like me.
“I love you, Liz,” my mom said. “Be brave. I have the number of the phone booth. I’ll call you soon.”
“Okay.”
“Bye, sweetie.”
The dial tone screamed in my ear. Brave … I had no idea how to be brave. I couldn’t think of anything that felt even close to brave, here in this terrifying place. I tried to find the bright light, the hope that was such a part of me before, but it felt too far away.
I slunk back to my room, closed the door, and moved my suitcase in front of it, as though that would keep me safe. My guitar case was leaning up against the wall; it had a yellow ribbon tied on it from eighth grade when I took a trip with my friend Mary to visit her much older sister in Detroit. I had to check the guitar at the airport. I didn’t feel like playing right now, I just felt like holding it. The sun was climbing up in the sky outside the window. I decided to put on my sneakers and my coat and head out the door. I retraced the path Ms. Graham and I had taken through the building the night before, when she first led me to my room. I hurried past the girls in the lounge and made my way to the main corridor, and to Ms. Graham’s office. Her door was open, and she was sitting at the desk, reading, her glasses at the end of her nose. When she looked up, I tried to smile.
“Hi, Liz. How was your night?”
“Okay. Kind of bad.” The tears were knocking at the back of my throat—of course they were—but I was learning that the more I fought them, the more they came. I swatted them away like little mosquitoes annoyingly landing on my cheeks.
“I was wondering, Ms. Graham, if I could get that pass you talked about. I’d like to go for a walk.”
“Yes, of course, it’s waiting for you at the guard desk.” The same unfriendly black woman, with the same ignoring attitude as the day before, sat in her seat behind the fence at the front desk. Ms. Graham buzzed herself into the desk area through a door on the side. She came back around and handed me a red laminated card with a yellow string looped through, as though I was supposed to wear it around my neck. She handed it to me with both hands like it was important or fragile.
“Here you are; please keep ahold of it. And, Liz, you may not allow anyone else to use it.”
“Okay, thanks.”
“If I don’t see you again, tomorrow is Tuesday. I’ll see you at one o’clock, here at my office?”
The guard woman buzzed me outside. I let the heavy door slam behind me. I buttoned up my coat against the cold and headed toward the small parking lot, where my mother and I had parked the night before. The space was now empty. I stood in the middle of it for a while, making lines in the fresh snow with my sneaker. My ears and hands were beginning to feel numb from the cold; I wished to God everything could feel numb.
The grounds looked different in the daylight. It looked even more remote and vast than last night. And it was so very quiet. To the left of the facility building and down a bit was the hospital. There weren’t a lot of cars or people, but there were some signs of life moving around it. To my right was a little cabin in the woods, like the house in the story of Hansel and Gretel might have looked. I peered around the trees to see if anyone was in the cabin, but I couldn’t tell. Everywhere there were snow-covered trees; it reminded me of the forest preserve at home in Winnetka. I noticed a brick path beneath the snow running along the side of the facility building. I decided to follow it to the back of the building. It continued on past the building several hundred yards, and I kept following it until I came upon a small wooden chapel with a single cross on top. The path stopped at the chapel entrance.
There was snow piled high on the steps. I pushed the snow back with my shoe and opened the creaky door. There was a stained-glass window with the image of the Virgin Mary etched out in cobalt blue glass, the sun shining through it. The chapel was empty and warm as I stepped inside and shut the door behind me. I was sure God was mad at me. I was really sure my mother had told him everything, all about how horrible I was. There was a small basin of holy water on the wall by the door. I almost reached in with my hand, but changed my mind. I saw the neat rows of little red votive candles lined up along the side wall; they were the candles you light for someone you love, or someone who died. I made my way to a pew in the back and sat down. I realized I’d never been alone in a church before. I’d gone every Sunday since I could remember with my brothers and sisters and my mom, while our dad stayed home in the living room and read the Sunday paper. Lee was definitely not a man of faith. I wasn’t sure if he even believed in God. I asked him once why he didn’t go to church, and he told me that sailing was his religion and his boat was his church, but he didn’t mention anything about God.
But Dorothy said
that the least we kids could do was give one hour a week to God, one simple hour. We took up almost an entire pew, all of us shoving and pushing not to sit next to our mom. Dorothy would cross herself and kneel when she got to the seat. She’d whisper her prayers aloud, sighing, weeping loud enough for people to hear, while everyone else prayed in their heads. I mostly prayed for her to be quiet. My sisters and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the closing hymn would be. Would it be something our mom knew, or kind of knew? God forbid it was “Amazing Grace” or “Hallelujah” because there would be no stopping her from singing her lights out—I mean belting, as if she were auditioning for a role in a Broadway show. No matter how good she was, that wasn’t the point. We were not in the kind of church where people spoke to Jesus through song. This was a Catholic church in Winnetka, Illinois. When the other parishioners strained and turned to see who in the world was singing so loudly, our mom remained completely oblivious, looking up at the stained-glass windows, singing her heart out. Nothing could break the moment when Dorothy was in it.
I looked up at the small altar in the sweet chapel and realized my tears had finally stopped. My mind felt quieter. I got up and walked over to the little votive candles. I reached in my pocket, found a quarter, and placed it in the slot. I didn’t know if I was loved or dead, but I lit one candle in the middle, closed my eyes, and asked God to forgive me for having sex.
• • • •
I could hear Wheel of Fortune playing in the lounge when I returned from my walk. I would have liked to watch TV but didn’t dare go in. I remembered the red-earring girl from the night before. I took the long way, all the way around three hallways, rather than walk through the lounge to get to my room. I held tight to the pass in my pocket. Just as I got to my door, someone called my name from down the hall. It was Alice, the woman who’d been knocking on my door earlier.
“Liz, hey, Liz, well there you are. Hello, hello!” She put her hands on her hips and smiled big. Alice was older, maybe in her fifties. There were deep lines all over her pale face, and her light blue eyes closed almost all the way when she smiled. She was small and wobbly in a funny-looking way, like a Weebles toy. Her midwestern accent was so thick that I had to pay particularly close attention to understand what she was saying. She didn’t look like a supervisor, she looked more like a little grandmother, but she sounded like a supervisor. She shouted a bit when she spoke.
“Dinner is at five-thirty, and even if you’re not hungry, Liz, that baby in your belly is.” I wasn’t used to acknowledging the baby in my stomach; it had only been a few days since I had even known the baby existed. It still made me uncomfortable. I didn’t want to, but I followed her into the lounge. Everyone stopped talking when I walked in. I didn’t have the energy to be scared; I just stood there.
Alice shouted, “Well, come on, girls, let’s go. It’s Salisbury steak night.”
The girls slowly got up and filed out. We went down a hall, and then down a staircase, and into a basement hall with no windows. I smelled a funky, rank smell and hoped it wasn’t the food. I held back in the line and watched as the girls filed into a small cafeteria-type room with two long tables. There were a few older women wearing hairnets standing over a cafeteria-type dish-the-food-out setup. I took a tray and a milk and waited. I was the last person in the line. An older-looking black lady dishing the food out said to me, “New girl?”
“Yes.”
“What’s your name?”
“Liz.”
“How far along are you, Liz?”
“Four and a half months.”
“You kidding me, child? You don’t even look pregnant! You gotta feed that baby. Here, you don’t have to say it, but I’m gonna give you double portions.” She slopped two huge spoonfuls of what looked like dog food onto a plate, then passed the plate to the next lady. She added two spoonfuls of stewed, watery, green spinach-esque slop and some sort of mealy white thing. She handed the plate back to me, and I put it on the tray and tried not to look disgusted. That rank smell was the food. I sat a few feet away from the last girl on the bench and felt everyone’s eyes on me. I almost thought I would be sick to my stomach. This was way beyond anything I’d smelled on an airplane, or in a hospital, or in our fridge at home when something went bad—this was gnarly bad. I drank a few sips of the milk, but there wasn’t a chance I could eat the food. I waited to see what we were supposed to do with our dirty trays and followed the girls when they stood up to leave. The cafeteria woman watched me as I dumped the food into the garbage.
I was famished. I saw a vending machine with snacks and soda; maybe I could go back later to get something. I hadn’t eaten since my Ritz crackers from the gas station the day before. On the way up the stairs, I started to feel dizzy. I stopped for a second to try to steady myself, but my knees gave out and I fell down a few steps to the landing. One of the really pregnant girls saw me; she screamed super loud, and the Alice lady came. Everything went dark. Next thing I knew, I was on a table in a small room. A doctor was looking in my eyes with a light.
“You okay, young lady?”
“Where am I?”
“You’re in purgatory,” he said with sort of a rude sneer. “You’re dehydrated and malnourished is what you are, and more importantly you’re pregnant. We’re going to have to hook up an IV and get some fluids in you. You have a child in your stomach that needs sustenance.”
I’d never met a doctor who didn’t at least pretend to be nice; this man was cold, and clearly annoyed by me. He put a needle in my arm, hooked a bottle to a big stand, and left.
As I looked around the small and unfamiliar room, I thought about the doctor, and the girls, and the cafeteria, and the facility, and then it hit me, just how alone I really was in this strange and terrible place. Everything had happened so quickly. Only three days ago I was fighting in the kitchen with the twins, getting mad at them for wearing my clothes without asking. I missed home so much. I closed my eyes and took myself back.
• • • •
There was a night when my parents were having a party, downstairs in our living room. I was about five years old. I’d climbed into bed and was waiting for my mom to come up and tuck me in. I could hear Dorothy’s laughter roaring above everyone else’s, and it made me smile. I heard the swooshing of her party dress coming down the hall. She peeked in and smiled.
“You still up?”
“Yep.”
“Good night, sweetheart. Don’t forget to say your prayers.” I could smell the hint of alcohol mixed with her Aqua Net hairspray as she leaned forward to push the hair off my face. Her string of pearls moved back and forth and touched my chin as she tucked me in.
“Can I have your dress when I get older, Mom?”
“May you have my dress? Of course you may, sweetie.”
“I like the sparkles.”
“Me too.” She smiled and kissed my forehead.
“Good night, Mom. Sounds like fun down there.” And then my dad appeared at the door. He poked his face in, smiled at my mom, and said, “You better go down, Dorth; they want you to sing.”
My mom stood up, straightened her dress, and said, with a casual air, “I’m not going to sing.”
My dad looked at her, then at me, and as she walked out we both rolled our eyes and together said, “She’s gonna sing.”
After my dad tucked me in and kissed me good night, we sat and listened to the amazing sound of my mother’s voice from downstairs.
Blue moon
You saw me standing alone
Without a dream in my heart …
I opened my eyes to find Ms. Graham standing at the end of the bed.
“How you feeling, Liz?”
“Where am I?”
“You’re in the medical room just two doors down from the cafeteria, in the basement of the facility.”
“Okay. Can I go back to my room or no?”
“Yes, you can go back soon. I’ll have to call your parents and let them know you’ve ha
d an incident, but the doctor says the baby is just fine, healthy heartbeat and all. He just wants to monitor you a little bit longer.”
The baby—right, I’d almost forgotten. The whole reason I was here. I was groggy as I made my way back to my room. I slept through the entire night. The next morning, I took a shower and let the warm water fall hard on my bruised arm from the IV. I had no towels, so I dried myself off with one of my T-shirts. I put on a new pair of underwear, threw a big sweater over my head, and slipped into my soft sweatpants with the name of my high school prominently displayed in big letters down the thigh. New Trier East. I’d waited my whole life to get to New Trier, to be an Indian, part of the great school that had been around since even before my mom was a little girl. Where Charlton Heston, Rock Hudson, Ann-Margret, and all sorts of famous people had gone. Where my older sisters and brothers drove off together every day. Where I could watch my sister Kiley, a tiny rubber band of a cheerleader who balanced herself each week at the top of the insanely high human pyramid on the football field at halftime. She was the star, and she never fell, not once. I rubbed my hand along the letters on my sweatpants and thought about chorus class, and my phenomenal English teacher, and the lunchroom the size of Texas where they blasted Bruce Springsteen’s “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” every day. And then I heard a loud knock at the door. It was the Alice lady again.
“There will be no skipping meals for you anymore, Liz. Breakfast is in ten minutes and you need to get there.”
On the way to breakfast I passed the big, big pregnant girl who screamed for help for me the night before, when I fainted.
She looked at me and asked, “Are you all right?”
Her entire face was covered in huge red pimples or boils. I’d never seen anything like it; it jolted me enough to have to turn away.
I looked at the ground and said, “Yes, thank you.”
She walked past me and hollered, “That’s okay. I’m a good screamer.”