At Helena’s house, the porch light is on, but all the windows are dark. I would like to get a look at her fiancé, so I put my face to the glass of the front windows, but the house looks empty. I can see the dim outline of the furniture in her living room, but the glare from the street lamps is too great. I go around the side of the house to the back, where one of the kitchen windows is open a crack. There’s a fine smell coming from the kitchen, as though many healthful meals have been prepared between those walls, so I lift the window all the way, carefully remove the screen, and climb inside. Once in, I am conscientious in refitting the screen back into the window frame.
I am accustomed to dark, empty houses. I know how to navigate them. You rely on your senses. You trust your widened pupils, your outstretched fingertips, your animal nose.
I go upstairs. In her bedroom, I discover a picture of Helena and her fiancé in a frame by the bed. The picture is taken against the backdrop of some wide, forested valley—as though the only mountains worth climbing are the ones they climb together—and he is a very handsome young man with good eyebrows and an authoritative smile. She wears a baseball cap in the picture, and I wonder if I should get a baseball cap—though I would not know which team logo it should bear.
I lie down on the bed and smell the pillow and try to imagine what it is like to see, every night, the moonlight cast its particular shadow dance over the contours of this room. I imagine what it is like to be pressed under the body of that imposing man in the picture.
In her closet, I find her running shoes, set neatly beside each other, the laces tucked inside. When I put one of them to my nose, I smell nature, ruddy and bountiful. Her toothpaste, I am pleased to see, is the same brand as mine, though all the lotions and shampoos in her shower come in bottles that I’ve never seen on the shelves of our local grocery store. There is a little nest of her hair in the drain of the shower.
But I am drawn again downstairs, to the kitchen, because that is where I suspect Helena truly lives. The refrigerator is filled with produce, with small cartons of yogurt, with milk on the edge of souring. There are no dishes in the sink. From the smell of it, the ones in the dishwasher are clean and ready to be put away. I run my fingers over the deck of china plates standing there proudly.
In one of the cabinets, I find a jar of wheat germ that announces itself as an excellent source of folic acid and vitamin E. It suddenly feels like a tremendous oversight that I have never had any wheat germ in my house. It is clearly the source of so many good things. Wondering what new splendors might grow from the germ of wheat, I decide to take the jar with me. This will be essential to my friendship with Helena. This is what I have been missing—the key I have been looking for, the one that will unlock more conventional relationships with the world.
Except Marcie Klapper-Witt’s neighborhood watch must have seen me when I climbed in through the window of Helena’s house—because when I leave by the front door, the police are there waiting for me, their hands poised and ready over their holstered pistols, the lights on their car flashing pretty against the treetops.
Chapter 12
The name of my birth town isn’t really Pale Miranda. That would be a very fanciful name for a town, and most towns are named in the service of either commerce or heritage. The town where I grew up is of the latter variety, and its real name is Polikwakanda, which is an indigenous name—supposedly from the Abenaki tribe, though I have never been able to find any reference to the word in my research of Native American languages. I don’t know what it means, and maybe it means “town where monsters live” or something like that, but the only sense my young girl’s tongue could make of the word was Pale Miranda, and so that’s how I thought of the place where I was raised—even beyond the time when I was grown old enough to know better.
When I walked into the prom, there were banners everywhere that said, FAREWELL POLIKWAKANDA SENIORS!
Farewell, Pale Miranda.
*
Dances in the town where I grew up were curious events. In other towns, the school dance is an opportunity to break free and go wild for a little while. But because our wildness was routine, because we were reminded of it monthly in cut lips and bruised thighs, our dances were tame. People stood around in compulsory clusters. They talked about dull things. No one tried to sneak vodka into the punch. No virginities were lost underneath the stage or in the backseats of cars in the parking lot. Virginities were simply not things toppled by clumsy, drunken lunging. Instead they were seized and forfeited in clawing battles under full moons while the naked apparitions of your friends looked on, howling. So it was.
When people danced at the prom, they danced slowly, pressed together and rocking back and forth with the sweet romance of dispassion. The tissue streamers wafted to and fro like underwater weeds. The students chatted pleasantly with the adult chaperones. People yawned. They went outside and looked up at the sky because they missed the moon. They sat on curbs and waited.
The previous year, I had gone to the dance with Polly. That now seemed like a very long time ago. We had already started pulling away from each other even then. I remembered seeing her across the gym, laughing at some joke told by a boy who, we had both agreed, was ridiculous. I remembered wondering about the integrity of Polly’s personality, because I did not understand how people could go for so long being one thing and then, overnight, suddenly become something else. Such behavior seemed unnatural to me. A year later, though, I knew the difference between unnatural and unliterary. The natural world, it turned out, was not very literary. You could say it had poetry, but it was a rough brand of poetry.
So when I walked into the decorated gym, I entered alone.
What I realized was how far from normal my connections with other people had become. My interactions were based upon spite or jealousy or rage or strange hungers—but whatever they were, they were not dance-going relationships.