“You can go, you know,” she says. “Really. I’m the one that hit him. Besides, I think it’ll be a while.”
“No, it’s okay,” I say, like my staying is some sort of sacrifice, like we’re in this together. But actually in my haste to go, I left my wallet in his apartment. Not to mention my keys, my clothes. I’m wearing nothing but the unlaced boots I wedged my feet in when I staggered out the door, my mother’s red night slip stained with Chinese food, and a cardigan splattered with Archibald’s mouth blood. I can’t bring myself to borrow money from Britta and I’m at least an hour’s walk from our apartment. I called Mel a couple of times on the hospital courtesy phone. No answer, no call back, even though I left messages. Maybe she’s out dancing. Or maybe she feels these are my just deserts.
I watch the silent TV on the wall above the sick people and the ugly leather chairs. On the screen, two fat girls in stretch pants are screaming and strangling each other on a stage strewn with overturned chairs. They’re going to kill each other, from the look of it, until two big bald men in black polo shirts suddenly appear to separate them. Along the bottom of the screen is a caption that reads, “I Cheated on You with Your Best Friend!”
I turn to Britta but she’s pointedly flipping through an old copy of Woman’s World. Feigning interest in yarn art. The scarf she used to mop up Archibald’s blood is sticking out of her large purse. It’s a nice purse. The sort my mother would buy. I remind myself that Britta is another country, another sort of terrain, strange and distant from me. That she is bigger than I am. Older. Sadder. More beyond saving. That body-wise, spirit-wise, I’m just a room compared to her sad house.
“Did Archibald ever play you that Peggy Lee song, ‘Is That All There Is?’” I ask her.
For a while she says nothing, just frowns into her magazine at a photo of a wreath made out of dark green pipe cleaners.
“Archibald played a lot of songs,” she says at last.
I look back at the TV.
One of the fat girls has now broken loose from security and has the other girl in a headlock. Behind them, between their abandoned, overturned chairs, a thin, ferrety-looking man sits serenely. This man watches as security separates the fat girls once more. He watches them claw and kick the air helplessly. He watches and he smiles, like such violence and misery are the stuff of life. When he suddenly smiles wide, maybe at something one of the fat girls screams, he reveals a missing incisor. I think of the way Archibald looked after he got hit. How after the shock wore off, he started laughing. Laughed in the taxi all the way to the hospital, the bandage that Britta had loosely shoved in his mouth already soaked through with blood, his laughter making the blood drip hotly down his chin.
“He never played you that song and talked to you about it? About his philosophy?” I ask Britta again. I’m looking at her, but she won’t look at me.
“I really don’t want to talk about this with you. If that’s okay.”
“Okay.” I look at her. I see her chins are tilted upward, quivering. “Your book came in, by the way.”
“What book?” she snaps.
“How to Care for Your Dachshund. You ordered it from me.”
“Oh,” she says, as if she only distantly remembers. “Right.”
“It’s ready for you at the desk. Whenever you want it.”
? ? ?
I watch these laughably obese girls lunge for each other and get pulled apart once more. Their fat arms still reaching out to throttle each other.
Britta stands up suddenly.
“I’m going to get myself something from the cafeteria.” She hesitates, then looks down at me. “You want anything?”
Food. I forgot all about it even though I haven’t eaten in hours. The minute she offers, I feel how my stomach is empty, that I’m starving.
“No thanks,” I say, shaking my head. “I’m not hungry right now. Maybe later.”
I watch her hunched, doomed shape turn away and lumber all the way down to the end of the hospital corridor, then disappear through the swinging doors.
The Girl I Hate