Читать книгу The Fainting Room - Sarah Pemberton Strong - Страница 9

5.

When Evelyn was a child, everyone in the circus had expected she would follow her parents and older sister, up the ladders to the top of circus tent and out onto the high wire. But the wirewalking gene’s appearance was sporadic: Evelyn’s sister Alice Marie had got the strawberry-blonde hair and the balance; Evelyn had got the carrot color and wobbly feet. Her parents hoped she would grow out of it, but as she grew it was more firmly into clumsy diffidence; by the time she turned nine it was clear she would never be part of the act.

So while the rest of her family did tricks a hundred feet up in the air, Evie sat in the trailer cutting pictures from magazines. She and her sister each kept a scrapbook they called “Dream Life.” The pages of Alice Marie’s Dream Life were filled with promotional photographs of famous high wire acts; her dream was to continue on her trajectory toward them. Evie’s scrapbook resembled a kind of personal decorating file. Some pages were filled with individual pieces of furniture arranged as if the page were a room; others represented the kind of neighborhood she wished she lived in, with cutout pictures of various houses pasted into the book in two lines to form a street along which she added crayon drawings of trees, people, and cars.

MY HOUSE she’d write above the one that was her favorite, an arrow indicating the window of the room that would be hers. It was a measure of the oddity of growing up in a circus that the wirewalking scrapbook held the fantasy more likely to be achieved. The dream of a stationary house, a canopy bed, a backyard swing set—Evie might as well have pasted in castles.

Every picture that she snipped for Dream Life Evie carefully slathered with glue, pressed it down into her scrapbook and held it there until she was sure it would remain fixed for good, something her real life could never do; every two or three days she woke to find the trailer in a new location, having moved in the night while she slept, rocked by wheels that carried her thousands of miles without ever delivering her from the place she did not belong, her home.

Now, standing in the spare bedroom that would become Ingrid’s when she arrived this afternoon, Evelyn thought of her old Dream Life scrapbook—this guest room needed some serious Dream Life help. It was the one room in the house that had always been, to her eyes, depressingly furnished: a threadbare quilt lay across an antique iron bed, both of which had belonged to Ray’s grandmother; on the floor was a rug Ray called a Kilim, which he said was very valuable but Evelyn thought looked ratty. When she first moved in, she’d thought she might make this room her own, a sewing room perhaps, decorated with things she’d picked out herself. But not wanting to do anything that might offend Ray and perhaps even make him change his mind about marrying her, she hadn’t said anything, and over time the idea had faded.

Ingrid’s arrival was the perfect excuse to change the furnishings. Now that the decision had been made and Ingrid was definitely coming, Evelyn was feeling better. Even if they hadn’t exactly hit it off at first meeting, maybe having Ingrid around would be more like what she was used to from growing up in Jones and Wallace, where you had other people around whether you liked them or not, and you sat around with them and shot the breeze or shared a Fresca and didn’t think too much about it.

At the Burlington Mall, Evelyn chose a cheerful yellow chenille for Ingrid’s bedspread and yellow plaid curtains for the windows. She bought a new bedside lamp with a yellow shade to replace the old brass thing Ray had in there, and an oval yellow throw rug, which would give her a way to move the ratty Kilim to the attic. If Ray asked where it was, she could tell him she’d put it away to protect it in case Ingrid spilled something. She even found yellow plastic clothes hangers.

When Evelyn had hung the curtains, plugged in the new lamp, remade the bed and changed the rug, she went out of the room and came back in again to admire the effect.

But something was wrong. It was not that the yellows were all slightly different colors, or that the brightness of the bedspread made the iron bed frame look dingy. No, it was a problem with the room in relation to the rest of the house—her furnishings didn’t belong. They were like the big-eyed ceramic cat she had bought on a whim at Woolworth’s last fall and set on the nightstand in their bedroom. It had stayed there all of one day, until Ray asked, “Where’d that come from?” Though his tone was mostly one of curiosity, she had suddenly seen through his eyes how tacky it was, how very trailer, and after he’d left for work, she’d gone out to the shed and thrown it into the aluminum garbage can where it smashed to hollow pieces.

Well, it was too late to do anything about the guest room now. Evelyn forced herself to take the clothes hangers out of their shopping bag and hang them in the closet. At least those looked all right. Then she noticed what was on the closet’s top shelf—Joe’s tattoo kit. She’d tossed the black case there when she first moved in, intending to deal with it later, and hadn’t.

Jesus, Evie Lynne. All she needed was for Ingrid to discover Joe’s tattoo kit. She knew she should just get rid of it, even knew from experience exactly what she could get for it, having seen Joe put it in and out of hock a dozen times when he needed money for poker. But the problem, with both the tattoo kit and with the other things in the house that reminded her of Joe—his army tags, a tiny pistol with an inlaid wood grip, the box of ashes that had once been his body—the problem was that getting rid of these things entailed thinking about them again, picking them up and feeling them become part of you again while you remembered how it all went down.

Evelyn went into the fainting room and shoved the tattoo kit beneath a cardboard box Ray had labeled checks/statements 1978–1981. There was a lot of junk in that closet already—old files, old coats, shoeboxes full of junk. One more little black case wouldn’t matter.

The box of ashes was in the back of her bedroom closet with her winter clothes. It was terrible to keep it there, she knew. She had looked in at the contents just once, right after she got them, and the sight of the coarse gray powder interspersed with small chunks of bone had made her hold on to the edge of the Airstream’s Fridgette to keep from falling. Not with grief, though she had cried plenty. It was the suddenness and completeness of the transformation that made her feel the world was coming apart: This gritty dust had been her husband.

Cause of Death: Broken Neck. Evelyn had stared at the death certificate, amazed that the incident could be reduced to just two words, ten little scrawly letters holding hands along a tightrope of pre-printed ink. Joe had fallen from a height of three feet, down the Airstream’s four aluminum steps. Broken Neck did not begin to cover it—for cause of death, you might as well write, Stopped Being Alive.

“You can deliver the ashes yourself,” the circus manager had said kindly, as if this were a mission that would ease her heart. He bought her a bus ticket to Boston, where Joe was from, and gave her a hundred dollars for expenses. Then, just a few hours after the cremation was finished, the entire circus left town: the Jones and Wallace Big Top was due in Greensboro the day after and it was bad luck to miss a jump.

After the grueling bus trip, after figuring out how to get from the bus station to Winthrop, the home of Joe’s parents, after wandering around for an hour in the October rain and finally finding the address, the woman who answered the door informed Evelyn without opening the screen that no Cullens had been there for years.

“I knew ’em though. Terrible family, the parents always drunk and fighting in the yard. The boys was all wild. Wha’dja wanna see ’em for, Red?”

So that was that. She was eight hundred miles away from the only life she had ever known with nothing but a cheap suitcase full of cheap clothes and a box full of cremated husband.

Exhausted from death and travel, Evelyn dropped onto the hotel bed that was foreign in its size, its silence, and cried. She’d spent her entire twenty-nine years in the Jones and Wallace Big Top and Side Show as dead weight, a talentless hanger-on. The closest she’d ever gotten to the status of performer was to stand beside Joe in a spangled bikini, tattoos oiled up to catch the spotlight, and pass him his props—umbrellas, dull knives, swords. And now there was not even that to go back to. She found the Gideons’ Bible in the nightstand and let the translucent pages fall open.

My beloved spake and said unto me, Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away. For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth—

Evelyn threw the book on the floor: it was rainy October and the ground was brown and barren; her former beloved was bone and ash and no one called her name. There were no flowers anywhere. She cried herself to sleep.

Only in the morning, having slept all night in a structure without wheels attached to it, did it occur to her that she had at last done the thing she had for so long dreamed of doing.

By accident, without premeditation, she, Evelyn, had left the circus.

She would not turn around and go back.

That afternoon she found work doing manicures, the same job her mother had done during the winters when the circus didn’t travel. The Hollywood House of Beauty, with its cracked linoleum and acetone fumes, sat squeezed between a convenience store and a prostitutes’ hotel. For a week she went between the salon and the room she’d rented a few blocks away, with its stained sheets and smelly halls. After eight days of this she was almost ready to go back to Jones and Wallace after all; she was worn out with pretending she knew she would be all right, pretending she had anything that looked like a future, pretending she was not a circus freak. But then, walking home from work on Friday afternoon, she saw the poster, plastered to a telephone pole. An elephant draped in an American flag, a tiger leaping through a ring of fire, and at the top, the famous typeface:

RINGLING BROTHERS & BARNUM & BAILEY CIRCUS THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH

And in smaller letters at the bottom: FINAL WEEK

She could not afford it; she could barely pay her rent. But there it was. Not just any circus, but the epitome of all circuses. And she had never seen it.

Thinking she might at least talk to some of the clowns after the show, and hating herself for being so desperate, she bought the least expensive ticket there was for the Saturday matinee and went to Boston Garden in the rain.

Laaaaaaaadies and Gennnnntlemennnnn!

And there she met Ray Shepard.

At a circus? And by himself? Ray?

He had gone under protest. Driving into Boston on a rainy weekend to watch elephants parade around was not the last thing in the world he wanted to be doing, but it was low on his list. He would never have been there—never have met Evelyn—were it not for his boss, George Dunlap, and the caprice of a client that Dunlap was trying to win.

In Ray’s first decade at Dunlap and Scott, the firm had been known for contextual architecture—designing buildings that looked as if they’d always been there, as Ray put it, as opposed to buildings that appeared to have been plunked down from an alien universe. But after Scott died, things began to change: first a commission for a Stalin-era style bank in the center of an old mill town, then a convention center whose smoked glass walls and boxy construction reminded Ray of a dirty fish tank.

Ray had so far managed to avoid these projects, working instead on zoning-sensitive renovations in the North End or on Beacon Hill. At the firm he was considered brilliant but impractical: an architect with a striking gift for design that was undermined by flagrant disregard for the realities of twentieth-century budgets. He had advanced perhaps not as much as he should have after fourteen years, due to his inability to finish a job without cost overruns, but this hadn’t bothered him, much: his over-budget designs, when allowed to be built, had won preservation awards and once gotten a photo spread in the Boston Globe Magazine; to Ray, this more than made up for his otherwise mediocre standing in the office. It also helped him avoid projects that offended his aesthetic sensibilities. But then Dunlap made him project manager of the Westbrook College sports arena.

Ray had protested. “Every one of Westbrook’s buildings is a windowless concrete blob,” he told his boss. “This isn’t the kind of work we do.”

“Yet we are, in fact, doing it. Thus there is a flaw in your reasoning.”

“But why put me on this? I specialize in period restoration, not the nadir of Brutalism.”

“You specialize in—but are not limited to—period restoration at the firm of Dunlap and Scott. I’m your boss, Ray. Remember me? George Dunlap.” Dunlap offered his hand; kept it there so long Ray was finally compelled to shake it. Dunlap’s hand was as cool as his expression.

“That’s all settled then,” Dunlap said, as if they’d been shaking on a deal. “Now listen, Ray. You’ve met Fergus Keeley, the Westbrook alum whose donation is funding this arena. Keeley played for the Celtics all of one season back in 1958, and he has some rather specific ideas about the structure that will bear his name. We’re going to humor him. I’m having Joanne get the two of you tickets for a Celtics game at Boston Garden. Let him tell you what he wants built.”

That must be a joke, Ray thought, though he’d never known Dunlap to make one. He might ask Ray to have dinner with a client, perhaps, but a not a basketball game. Surely it was a joke? He went out to talk to Joanne, the receptionist.

“Oh dear,” Joanne said. “I think this is my fault.”

“Yours?”

Joanne had been at the firm for fifteen years, even longer than Ray had. She was somewhere around forty, was unintimidated by office politics, and besides being an excellent secretary, she knew quite a bit about architecture—more, Ray thought, than some of the newer architects. She had conveyed, without coming out and saying it, that she shared Ray’s dim view of the direction Dunlap and Scott was headed.

Now she took off her big-framed glasses, a habit she had when she wanted to say something she considered important.

“My fault. Yes. The other day I was taking dictation for Dunlap about the Keeley arena. And then out of the blue, he asked me who around here was a good listener. Besides me. And—well, I said you were.” Joanne looked away, embarrassed.

“That’s kind of you,” Ray said, “but how do we get from there to my having to sit through a basketball game with Fergus Keeley?”

“Keeley likes to talk,” Joanne said. “A lot. I didn’t know why Dunlap was asking, but then when I said you were a good listener, he said, ‘in that case, I’ll have Shepard take him on.’ I’m sorry, Ray—I know the Keeley arena’s not your kind of project. I even tried to tell Dunlap to give it to someone else.”

“Dunlap should make you partner,” Ray said. “And it’s not your fault. But does it have to be a Celtics game? I don’t follow basketball at all.”

“Well, the point is to go see something at Boston Garden. I think Keeley wants his arena to look just like it.”

“Dear Lord, this is not why I became an architect. Tickets to anything but basketball, all right, Joanne? You owe me that. Just get me out of having to listen to Keeley talk sports for three hours.”

Thursday Joanne handed him a Bostix envelope.

“The circus?” Ray was baffled.

“To you men, Keeley talks about his basketball court injury. To me, he shows pictures of young Gus Keeley the third, and the other one—little Larry, I think it is, named after Bird. So I told him you wanted to meet his grandchildren. What’s wrong?”

“The circus? Screaming children, sticky cement floors, agoraphobia-inducing crowds, aggressive vendors—”

“You said, ‘Get tickets for anything but basketball.’ Besides, you have two tickets. So you can bring a guest.”

“That’s true,” Ray said absently, not seeing Joanne’s hopeful smile.

He was thinking there was no one in his circle of friends and acquaintances he could possibly talk into accompanying him to the circus, much less with Keeley and his grandchildren in tow. He wasn’t dating anyone, though he had been set up several times that year by friends’ wives. The wives always sought him out at parties and talked to him—unlike most of their husbands, Ray did khow to listen, ask questions. Then, inevitably, the wives would say, “I know the perfect girl for you. Just take her out, you’ll love her.”

But love was never what emerged. Ray always left these dates feeling acutely aware of a kind of mental checklist on which both he and the woman seemed to be ticking off items while they discussed Gorbachev or Gloria Steinem, and when the date—or, occasionally, the brief relationship—was over, he would feel relieved at being alone again, spending his free evenings with a book or the radio’s evening concert, throwing himself into one project or another, oblivious of the rut into which his life was settling, deeper and deeper with each passing year. And somewhere along the way, he became aware of emotions he could not believe he was feeling: boredom, loneliness, and the inexplicable sense that he had taken a wrong turn somewhere. That absurd though it sounded, he might be wasting his life.

He felt certain he was wasting his afternoon when, on a rainy Saturday in early November, he arrived at Boston Garden to meet Fergus Keeley. He navigated the current of jostling bodies up through the Garden’s vast and chilly stairwells, and the damp crowds surging around him made him feel both claustrophobic and lonely. His seat was good—midway up in the orchestra section in front of the center ring, and a bank of several seats on either side of him were empty, waiting, he supposed, to be filled by Keeley and his grandsons. Despite the empty seats around him, still Ray felt hemmed in by noise and bodies. The cement under his feet was slick with tracked rain and spilled soda, the damp in the air infused with the smell of elephant dung. But where was Keeley?

The lights went down and the ringmaster began rolling his voice out over the audience. The show began. Still Keeley did not appear. Clowns came and went, then bareback riders. Vendors went up and down the aisles hawking programs, popcorn, and noisemakers. The wedding of two midgets was announced.

A woman appeared in his aisle. “Excuse me,” she said, and Ray looked up, confused: was this Keeley’s wife? No, ‘excuse me’ meant, Move your knees, I want to get by. So he stood to let her pass, a young woman mostly hidden inside a hooded blue raincoat, holding in front of her like a torch a large burst of pink cotton candy.

“I was way up there where God lost his shoes,” she said above the noise of the orchestra. “No sense wrecking my eyes when there’s empty seats down here. No one’s sitting here, are they?” She plunked down in the seat next to his but one and took a bite of cotton candy.

“Ah, no, I mean, actually, I was supposed to meet some people in this row.”

“Then someone is sitting here, you mean?” She started to get up, and he waved his hand to stop her.

“You’re welcome to sit there,” he said. “I don’t think they’re coming.”

“Thanks,” she said, and shrugged out of her hooded raincoat, which Ray now saw had concealed brilliant red hair and an intent expression. She watched the clowns, he thought, as if she were studying for an exam. Her red eyebrows angled together in an odd little frown of concentration, broken now and again when she smiled. She seemed to be enjoying both the performance and her cotton candy, licking the clots of pink sugar off the tips of her fingers with gusto. Something about it made him feel sad: he was an imposter here. The next time a vendor climbed by, he signaled him over and asked for a bag of popcorn.

“No popcorn,” said the vendor. “Pinwheels, hooters, snake whistles. No food.”

Ray felt foolish.

“Here,” said the woman beside him, “piece of mine?”

Peace of mind, Ray heard her say, then interpreted correctly and watched in surprise as his hand reached out for the paper cone. Then he was holding the sticky thing and utterly ignorant of the rules for cotton candy eating. He stuck out a finger and touched the substance: it felt like cheap upholstery stuffing. He pinched a bit away and felt it dissolve slightly in the heat of his fingers. In his mouth it was oddly pleasant. There was a second of flavorlessness, sensation of eating a dust ball, and then the stuff melted in absurd sweetness over his tongue.

The spotlight swung up to the rafters and tightrope walkers were announced. Ray watched a shirtless man in glittering tights cross the wire blindfolded, pausing in the center to perform a backbend. When he righted himself by kicking his legs over his head the audience cheered. Ray thought he should probably cheer too, but felt too self-conscious. So he clapped, realizing as he did so that the woman beside him was silent, neither cheering nor clapping. He glanced at her. Her eyes were fixed on the performers. The cotton candy was gone, her hands were empty now, and she was crying.

He turned away, pretending not to notice, and the next time he allowed himself to glance at her, at intermission, her eyes were dry. She caught him looking and smiled. She wore too much makeup, he thought, but in spite of that, she was pretty, with bright eyes that looked more intelligent than her blue eye shadow suggested. And he liked the way she smiled at him: friendly without being a come-on, a kind of friendliness less guarded than what he was used to in New England; he knew without being told that she was from somewhere else. When the food vendor came by he bought two cups of soda pop and offered her one.

“So why’re you all alone in this row?” she asked. “Somebody stand you up?”

He explained about the sports arena and basketball and Fergus Keeley. And then, in a burst of not caring whether he was being a polite conversationalist he asked if she too had been waiting for someone.

She shook her head. “I came alone. I just saw a poster, on the way home from work.”

“What do you do?”

She hesitated. “I work in a beauty salon.”

He asked her which one, as if he were in the habit of frequenting beauty salons.

“Hollywood,” she said, in a tone that suggested the name annoyed her. Then the overhead lights dimmed. The show was beginning again and Ray was sorry; it was nice to talk to a woman he wasn’t trying to impress. Then he realized he did want to impress her. And he wanted her to keep talking—she had a voice with a hint of music in it, not a southern accent, quite, but her words were slower, rounder than he was used to hearing.

“What’s your name?” he asked, leaning in toward her and whispering since it was, after all, a performance they were watching. She smelled of cheap fruity shampoo and the vinyl of her raincoat and another, fainter scent he could identify only as female.

“Evelyn,” she answered, but she was not interested in talking any more; she was watching the tigers take their places in the ring below.

When it was over he walked beside her through the masses shuffling along the ugly cement ramps out into the rain.

“Can I drop you somewhere?” he asked.

She hesitated. “I was going to walk, actually. But you could walk me part of the way, I guess. I mean, if you want to.”

They set off down Causeway Street in the early evening light, a sky orange after the rain. She remembered he’d said he was an architect, asked in her lilting voice if he’d designed anything around here. Ray cast his eyes reflexively up and down the street. Beautiful buildings, some of them, above crummy storefronts. “Not on this street. But there’s something I worked on over near South Station.”

“I’ve been to South Station,” she said, the way someone else might say, I’ve been to Paris. As if it were a destination in itself. Her mascara had run, he noticed, and remembered the tears she’d shed during the performance. Why did that make his heart pound? Why did he want to take his handkerchief and wipe away the streaks of brown at the inner corners of her eyes?

Then she said, “It must be fun, designing buildings and things. When I was a kid, I used to cut out pictures in magazines of houses I wanted to live in and keep them in a scrapbook.”

“That’s very sweet.” Can I buy you a drink, he wanted to say, he did not say it.

She kept peeking at him from beneath the hood of her raincoat, wondering, he supposed, if this man were trying to pick her up. Ray wondered it too. He had never picked up a woman in his life, but everything about this afternoon was different from what he usually did. Then she pushed her hood back from her face and he saw all over again how very brilliant red her hair was. She caught him looking, and blushed, an actual blush, her fair skin coloring pink beneath its dusting of powder. She looked away, then looked back at him and smiled. Her two front teeth were very slightly pushed in, and he found this—there was no denying it now—unaccountably sexy.

Then she pushed a stray lock of hair behind her ear and he caught sight of the wedding band on her finger. Why hadn’t he noticed she was married? He didn’t want to pursue another man’s wife. He felt a twinge of unease at the idea that he had even started to do so, then told himself he was being childish; he hadn’t done anything, he was only walking her—where, actually? They were practically in Chinatown now. He mentioned this.

“Oh,” she said, “I didn’t mean to take you so far out of your way. I can go on alone from here. I live just a few blocks further on.”

She had misunderstood him. “I’m happy to walk you to your door,” he said. “I just wondered where—”

She was uncomfortable. Perhaps she was afraid to tell him where she lived in case he turned out to be a stalker. But she didn’t look frightened; if anything, she seemed embarrassed. “I’m practically there,” she said. “It’s on Washington Street, just at Lagrange.”

“Then I certainly should walk you the rest of the way. That’s a terrible neighborhood.”

“It’s the neighborhood I live in.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean it that way,” Ray said hurriedly. “I just meant I’ve probably made you late, ambling along talking, and now it’s dark: I’d hate for anything to happen to you.”

“I walk home from work every night,” Evelyn said, “so one night of protection probably won’t make much difference.” She traced a crack on the sidewalk with her shoe. “Well, it was nice meeting you. Now I guess have one friend here.”

“Not counting your husband, that is.” He blurted it.

“My husband?”

“I see you’re married.”

She followed his gaze to her left hand and raised it, looked at the ring as if she were surprised to see it there, and then back at him.

“We were separated,” she said, “and then three weeks ago he died. It was very sudden.” She crossed her arms and huddled inside her raincoat.

“Evelyn, I’m so sorry.” He didn’t know what he was feeling; it wasn’t sorry at all. “How terrible for you.”

“I came up here to give his ashes to his people,” she said, looking at the sidewalk. “And then I got kind of stuck here.” She looked up at him. “Why am I telling you this?”

“It sounds like you’ve had an awful time,” Ray said.

“Well—I should go.” She took a step away from him. “See you around.”

It was extraordinary, the feeling he was having. This afternoon he had become a man who went to the circus, who ate cotton candy, who was trying to pick up a redhead who worked in a beauty salon in the Combat Zone. He had the sense that he had stepped outside his life, and he was astonished to find he could breathe better here. He did not want her to go. It was as if when she left, the sense of freedom the afternoon had turned out to contain would disappear with her.

“Would you have dinner with me sometime?” He blurted it.

“Me?”

“You said you don’t know anyone here. I could show you the city a little, if you’d like.” His voice sounded unbearably foolish in his ears.

“Yes, I’d like.” She was laughing, now, he didn’t know why. “When?”

“Now,” he heard himself say.

“Seriously?”

What has come over me, he thought, but even as he wondered at himself, he took her arm. “The restaurant’s this way,” he said.

It was dark, it was French, there was a menu of nothing but wine. Evelyn hid her acid-washed jeans beneath the enormous white napkin and pointed at random to one of the indecipherable menu items. At least my manicure’s French, she thought.

Afterward, as they stood outside waiting for the taxi he’d called to take her home, he took her hand. His own hand was warm from the lined pocket of a good overcoat and she could not remember Joe Cullen ever taking her hand in this way, simply holding it as he stood beside her, in the whole twelve years of their marriage.

“I had fun with you tonight—” Ray began, and stopped. Cleared his throat. “Perhaps you’d like—” Stopped, ahem’d again.

He’s nervous, Evelyn realized. Because of me.

“Perhaps you’d let me cook you dinner next Saturday?”

At his house, that meant. He wanted to sleep with her, that meant. He had mistaken her for someone else, someone who hadn’t grown up in a circus, someone without a dead first husband whose death certificate said Broken Neck, someone whose body wasn’t covered in every known color of ink. But if she let him take off her clothes it would be all over because there was no way Ray would want a tattooed lady as a dinner guest. Never mind that she wasn’t a real tattooed lady—she had chickened out and refused to let Joe do anything below her knees and elbows or above her breastbone—it would be too much for Ray, this fancy architect who held the door open for her and ordered dinner in French.

When he found out about the tattoos that would be the end of it, yes, but she would let him cook her dinner first. Soak up the way he looked at her like a dry plant soaks up water. His eyes on hers as if he thought she was actually interesting. Or beautiful. Or good.

“Next Saturday—just consider it,” he said, opening the door of the taxi for her. “I’m an excellent cook.”

As if she could have said no. As if the cab, speeding back to her crummy rented room, were taking her anyplace else worth going.

Evelyn finished vacuuming the broken glass in the study and drew the curtains to hide the garbage bags taped over the broken window. The guest room, its almost-matching yellows bravely pretending to be the same shade, was ready for Ingrid’s arrival. Now there was the downstairs to tackle, dinner to think of. She was running the ElectroLux in the living room when Ray came home, early for once. She shut off the machine to greet him.

“My God,” he said, “it’s even more sparkling in here than usual. I take it Liz Luce didn’t reach you.” He kissed her forehead and she realized how sweaty she was.

“Did she call? I can’t hear anything when the vacuum’s running.”

“She got me at work. She’s busy with commencement and whatnot, so she asked if we’d pick Ingrid up at her dorm at 4:00—which was five minutes ago.”

Once again, Ingrid was arriving before she was prepared.

“Would you get her yourself, Ray? I’m a sweaty mess, and I still haven’t cleaned the guest bathroom.”

“You’re going to clean an already clean bathroom for a teenager who wears jeans held together with safety pins?”

“I’m cleaning because a guest should be welcomed into a clean house.”

“Okay, Emily Post,” Ray said, and then, lest she take the joke as a barb, bent to kiss her again.

When he had gone, Evelyn spritzed the bathroom mirror, scrubbed the tub, folded and refolded the towels. She knew she should stop if she wanted time for a shower, but she checked the guest bedroom again, smoothed the chenille spread, pulled a dust bunny from under the radiator, noticed she had hung one of the curtains wrong side out, turned it around and there was Ray’s Saab pulling into the driveway. Evelyn leaned against the window, sweat running down between her breasts, and watched as Ray and Ingrid each took a cardboard box from the back of the car. Today Ingrid’s hair stuck up from her head in a series of points, like a cross between the Statue of Liberty’s crown and a spike helmet. Evelyn wondered how she’d gotten it to do that—Elmer’s glue, maybe? She’d been stalling on the shower, she realized, because she didn’t want to be the one to bring Ingrid inside, help her unpack, show her the bedroom—what if Ingrid didn’t like it? Evelyn went into the master bathroom and locked the door, slowly peeled off her clothes. You’re scared of her, you chicken. You’re scared of a sixteen-year-old kid.

Half an hour later, in fresh clothes and makeup, Evelyn was nearly ready when the sound of hammering made her forget about drying her hair. She went down the hall to investigate. The door to the guest room was open, and Ingrid was standing in the middle of the bed, hoisting above the headboard an enormous stuffed white owl mounted on a wooden plaque.

“Um, hi,” said Ingrid, a little gaspy from the weight of the plaque. She managed to get it hooked over the nail she had just hammered, with a hammer that now lay on the bedspread. Evelyn stared.

Ingrid dropped to her knees on the bed.

“I was just hanging up my owl,” she said. “Ray said to just put up my own stuff if I wanted.”

“Ray did?” Evelyn looked around, trying to take in what had happened. The curtains were gone. Ingrid had threaded the curtain rods through the arms of four tee shirts instead, two per window. One tee shirt had a silkscreen print of Reagan’s head with a cartoon balloon over it that said, “The bombing begins in five minutes.” The brand new bedspread was nowhere to be seen, and the bed was already unmade. One pillow had disappeared, and the other pillow had books lying on it. Evelyn turned her head sideways and read the titles: Farewell, My Lovely; In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer; Orienteering for Beginners; Silent Spring. There was a huge terrarium that appeared to be full of sand parked on top of the dresser; more books and piles of clothes lay scattered across the floor.

Ingrid cleared her throat. “It’s kind of a mess in here, I know,” she said. “It’ll take me a while to get everything set up.”

“I can see that. Where are the curtains?”

“Oh, I folded them up and put them in the bottom drawer. I um, I didn’t want them to get dirty or anything.”

But the curtains were nice, Evelyn wanted to protest. Her eyes fell on the missing pillow—on the floor between the bed and the nightstand—and she bent to retrieve it, composing in her head how she would phrase her complaints to Ray. But as she patted the pillow back in place she became aware of a sensation that had sprung up alongside her annoyance: something other than mess had transpired.

She straightened up and looked around the room again. Yes, there was no denying it. In the space of half an hour, Ingrid had done what Evelyn had not managed in over a year: she had made a part of Ray’s house utterly and unalterably hers. Ingrid’s, the room said. She had marked it: even the smell was different. Evelyn breathed in old cotton, tobacco, and—from the owl, she supposed—mothballs.

Ingrid was looking at her.

“Is there anything you need?” Evelyn said, just to be saying something. She hoped her tone of voice conveyed her disapproval of the mess, and not her admiration of the room’s metamorphosis.

“Everything’s great,” said Ingrid, oblivious to both. “It’s nice to have my own room for a change—I had a roommate at school.”

I want my own room, Evelyn thought. A silly thing to think when she had a whole house. This was her house, not only Ray’s but hers too, and yet Ingrid had just come right in and made herself feel at home. As if it were so easy.

“Well, I’ll bring you some fresh towels,” Evelyn said. “Your bathroom is down the hall on the—Oh!”

Right beside her on the dresser, in the terrarium she had thought was empty, lay a large mottled lizard. A head like a turtle’s, a pouch at the neck like a pelican’s. Dinosaur spines running from its head to the tip of its tail, snake markings. An exotic animal in a cage. Before Evelyn knew what she was saying, she had asked, “Can I take him out?”

Ingrid blinked in surprise.

Evelyn felt the fluttering panic of error stir in her chest, but before she could think of how to backpedal, Ingrid recovered herself, said, “Yeah, sure,” so Evelyn lifted the screen off the terrarium.

“Move slowly, and support his tail,” Ingrid instructed. Evelyn raised the lizard close to her face and breathed on him gently.

“Hey, how do you know that’s what he likes?” Ingrid asked.

“I—oh, is this what he likes?” Evelyn laughed, uncomfortable.

“Most people are scared to touch him,” Ingrid said. “Have you held a bearded dragon before?”

Bearded dragon. It sounded like one of her tattoos.

“No, never.” Pythons, tigers, an alligator—yes. But no bearded dragon.

“His name is Melvin,” Ingrid offered. “After my hometown. Look, he likes you—see, his eyes are rolling up in his head.”

“Like a snake’s.”

“You know about animals, huh?”

There was something like admiration in Ingrid’s voice, and Evelyn felt herself warm to it. “A little,” she said.

“I’m so relieved,” said Ingrid. “I thought you might be the type who freaks out at lizards.”

No, Evelyn thought wearily, I am not the type who freaks out at lizards. I am the type who is a freak.

Oh, why couldn’t Ingrid have been just a little more normal? Why couldn’t she have regular hair instead of that badly-dyed, spiky bird’s nest? Why couldn’t she at least like the curtains? Evelyn deposited the lizard back in his cage and replaced the screen. When she looked up again, she saw Ingrid was staring at her. Was some edge of tattoo showing? She glanced down and tugged reflexively on her sleeves. But Ingrid was looking at her scar. Evelyn’s own eyes went involuntarily to the thin line of white that began in the middle of her forearm and extended straight down over the back of her hand to where it ended between her first and second knuckle. She put her hands behind her back and said: “We’re dining at seven.”

“You mean you guys are going out?”

Evelyn pressed her lips together. “No, I mean that’s what time we’re eating dinner—here, downstairs. At seven.”

“Can I help with anything?” Ingrid asked.

“Just get your stuff put away,” Evelyn said. It came out sounding bitchy. “I mean,” she added, “take your time, get yourself settled in.”

Ingrid looked chastened. “Um, okay, thanks. For letting me stay here, I mean. I—I really appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome,” Evelyn said, and went down the hall. Thinking: Jesus, Evie Lynne, you’re the one invited her here. So how about act nice.