Читать книгу Diving the Wrecks - magdalena zschokke - Страница 7

She stopped at the drycleaners and trudged slowly back to the apartment, loaded down and covered with plastic bags. She decided to adopt her son’s survival technique: Have an invisible friend! Karl had given up his friend by the time he entered school, but she had always considered a totally loyal entity an enviable companion.

Californian Stacey would be her friend. She said to her, “Wrapped like a mummy in plastic. You think that would work? Seems it would make the fluids cook faster and rot the flesh rather than dry it, but I’m covered with other people’s lives. Maybe that’ll get me immortality.”

Turning into the road where she lived, she looked up and, once again, thought what made the apartment blocks so ugly and institutional was that they all had the same cold, square windows and used utilitarian blinds, rather than shutters.

Emma could remember the shutters from her childhood. They were wooden, solid, and heavy, painted green, red, or black, sometimes striped, and made the houses look as though they had on makeup. Often their middle parts were slats that could be moved up or down to let in light or a breeze as desired.

She explained to Stacey: “Shutters are used to lock us in. Ours were green. They lock with metal braces, and they are hard to force from the outside. They put a wooden wall between you and the outside. I remember waking up from one of the hated mid-day naps in total darkness, finding the sun gone, and the sky rent by lightning. That was when I decided the world was not a solid place.”

This time she imagined Stacey answering, “If you think of a harem, the shutters allow the women to look out without being seen by men passing by. What’s wrong with safe?”

“You don’t understand. Indoors is not safe; neither are thunderstorms. Not here anyway. You know what goes on behind closed shutters? I’ll tell you. It’s what I remember most about my father. I was standing outside my brother’s locked bedroom door. Behind it, I could hear the smack of leather on bare flesh, and I was counting the lashes. There was absolutely no other sound, and my brother never cried. I was so scared I peed my pants before I even went in, which earned me a few extra lashes with the whip.”

Stacey did not answer, did not ask why they had gotten punished, so Emma added, peevishly, “We hadn’t done anything much. Flooded the bathroom maybe, or forgotten to wash his car. You see, I think he just liked to do it.”

For some reason, the revelation did not make Emma feel better but worse. She felt as if she had betrayed herself as well as Stacey, as if she had told the story only to receive sympathy and in the telling made herself pathetic. “It’s true though,” she insisted, wishing she could undo the telling.

She shook her head in disbelief. Here she had an invisible friend, and already she was worried about what that friend thought of her. This was ridiculous. Who was Stacey, anyway?

She would be blond and look real cool in her black leathers. And she was tall and muscular—gorgeous, not masculine. Stacey was not like Emma, who, though tall, had long arms and a long face. The sales lady at the dress store said she had arms like a gorilla, and, even though she’d laughed as if she’d made a joke, Emma was sure she had meant it. Ever since then, she was self-conscious about her arms. Her shirts and sweaters were always rolled up or shoved back to the elbows just so nobody would think her sleeves were too short. She also had a long nose, a narrow face, and a melancholy slant to her eyes. Sometimes when she caught herself in the mirror, she was shocked at how ugly she was.

“When you look in a mirror, what do you see?” she asked Ron once. “I mean, not what do you think of the person in there, but what do you look at?”

Ron hadn’t understood the question, and they’d gone on to discuss the movie they were going to see. Later on the way to the bus stop, she said, apropos of nothing, ”When I look in the mirror, I always see my hair, no matter what. Like, I’m trying to see if my pants fit, and I notice I haven’t combed my hair. It’s as if I can’t see anything else. Maybe I am really invisible.”

“No, you’re not. I see you all the time,” Ron said.

He had an irritating manner of taking things literally. Sometimes Emma thought he wasn’t just slow but possibly stupid, although he seemed to do well at work. He was a clerk at the American embassy. He never said what he did there, but she had gotten the impression it had to do with visa applications.

“Why the American embassy?” she had asked him. “You want to go there? How did they pick you?”

“Well, they needed someone who speaks English, which I do. Otherwise, I don’t know. Why not the Americans? It’s one of the better-paid jobs, and the animal park is right there. I go walking almost every afternoon when the weather is good.”

“I know. You told me.”

Yet, she sometimes wondered about it. Perhaps he was a spy. Being so forgettable would be a good thing for a spy. She, on the other hand, felt that, although she was most often invisible, she was not forgettable. It was a wholly different thing. If you were ugly, people might wish not to see you, but, if they were forced to remember, like if they were questioned after an incident, they would probably remember the tall, ugly woman with the long nose.

Stacey, the Californian with the tan uniform, was neither ugly nor forgettable. She rode a Harley and understood surfing … but not surviving in Switzerland.