In Somerville, I used to hear stories about the evangelical church baptizing new congregants in Foss Park. They had water that they had turned holy and they poured it over the person’s head. They said a prayer and somehow that ritual was supposed to leave that person changed.
I always envied those people, envied the certainty of their faith, their ability to believe they were moving through life with a purpose.
If I stand upright, the water covers my waist, the rise of my stomach, and I feel the lethal chill of winter, so I sink down into the shadow of the clamshell. From there the clothing piled on the concrete edge of the pool looks far away.
I inhale, go under. I touch the lightning-shaped crack. I see the faded blue dolphins painted on the sides of the pool, flippers and noses bleached with time. I notice a freckle on my ring finger that did not exist before. My eyes are on fire from the chlorine and it is my choice to let them keep burning or not.
My choice, my choice.
Finally I get out and put on my bra and my jeans. I run back to my room, sweatshirt clutched to my chest, bare feet slapping the concrete.
I race past a woman standing by the ice machine in a nightgown, filling a plastic cup. When she sees me, the wet, shirtless girl running toward her, she screams and drops the cup and cubes scatter down the hallway, glinting like diamonds under the light.
In my room, I bolt the door and get in bed and wrap myself up in the sheets and the polyester comforter even though I know it has not been washed in a hundred years. Another little bug has gotten stuck to my collarbone and it leaves a dark streak when I wipe it away. I shiver and I shake until I have exhausted myself and fallen asleep, and a while later I wake certain of a presence outside my room. A presence that wants to get in. An intruder, the bolt of panic you feel before a strange man strikes you in the head or drugs you with chloroform, the nightmare that starts and ends and starts again when you wake in a basement, or never has a chance to start again because you don’t wake at all.
The green numbers on the bedside clock say 3:05 a.m. and outside someone is pounding on my door. I am hazy with sleep, slow at first to register the sound. The knob is shaking so hard, I think it’s going to fall off. I hear a boot striking, someone trying to kick their way inside.
In Mission Hill, the older girls kicked down bathroom doors while the younger girls were inside. This was one of the many ways they convinced us of their power. Every girl in Mission Hill learned how to finish peeing in twenty seconds flat, from squat to flush.
As I got older, I waited for that feeling of power to come alive inside me. I thought it would sprout on its own, like breasts or the downy hair on my legs. I didn’t understand that it had to be claimed.
I creep up to the peephole and see No Name thrashing against the door. His face is warped through the glass, turning the proportions strange. His nose is a jutting ridge, his eyes are dark pools. The rings in his face glow silver. He’s wearing the same clothes and his body is a black blur as he beats on the door. Something has happened to him since we worked those rooms together. He has changed, or maybe this person was there the whole time, smoking cigarettes and counting money in the break room, waiting to get out.
He stops for a moment. His mouth is open, his throat pale and tight. I can see that he’s breathing hard. I wonder if he can sense that I’m right there, just behind the door. He wipes his lips with the back of his hand.
He licks the silver ring in his lip and then throws his shoulder against the door. The security chain jangles and I back away, afraid that somehow he can see me standing half-naked in my room and is already thinking, Come on, girl. Could you make this any easier?
I can’t call the front desk because I know the manager will be on the side of No Name and will maybe even give him the key he needs to open this door, to make the jangling security chain the only thing between him and me. So I don’t pick up the phone. I don’t turn on a light. I put on the green gardening gloves. I get on my knees and crawl into the bathroom, moving slowly, my head animal low, and lock myself inside. The carpet leaves red marks on my knees. The floor is still wet from my watery footprints. I huddle in the tub. I cover myself with the bath mat. I rub away the dark streak on my collarbone. “Be still,” I say. My new meditation.
I wait in there until the noise stops, and I go out into the room and see light slipping through the blinds like a rescue.
25.
At dawn, I walk to the bus station. All the floors are quiet. The pool sits empty. There is no sign of the manager or No Name. There is no man in a trench coat selling books. I’m still wearing the gardening gloves. The city looks abandoned in the early-morning light.
Down the street from the motel I find an empty lot with circles of ice as large and dark as oil slicks. There are spidery cracks along the perimeter of one circle, a sharp plunge in the center. Farther down I see clusters of brick factories with tall glass windows and slender chimneys. What kinds of lives are happening here? The sun is a pale gold disc in the sky.
I board a bus bound for Birmingham, Alabama. I wonder what I will do or what will be done to me the next time I need cash.
In Columbia, Missouri, we collect more passengers. A man in bifocals sits down next to me and digs a ringing cell phone out of his pocket. “Fuck the guilt,” he says to the person on the other end of the line. “It’s no way to live.”
He hangs up and turns the phone over in his hands.
I sink into my seat and watch the slim points of tree branches bend in the wind.
The bus stops. The passengers change. The man in bifocals disappears into the day and a nun sits down next to me and starts talking about the immortal soul. She says we worry too much about the body, about where we take sacraments and pray, but the immortal soul isn’t inside us, isn’t in the body.
“Where is it then?” I ask her, and she says it can exist anywhere, that we have to go in search.