She moves around, in boots and that skanky fur, like an inspector.
“You at Yale?” asks Matt with a straight face, even though they know she’s not.
“Nah.”
Jamey asks: “Are you from here?”
“From around. You guys from here?”
“We’re from New York,” Matt says, lighting a smoke, his tone polite considering the absurdity of the question.
“You brothers?” Elise prompts.
“No,” says Matt, shaking out the match. “Just look like brothers.”
“Grew up together,” Jamey adds.
She’s watched them since she moved onto the block a few months ago, and could barely tell them apart before tonight. Now it’s obvious they’re opposites. She’s watched as they shaved on the other side of a steamed window, white towel around a waist. They buttoned long coats, getting into their cars where they talked on giant blocks of telephones.
Jamey gets up for another beer.
“Grab me one?” Matt says.
“Me too,” Elise adds.
Matt shoots a look to Jamey, who just grins and shrugs, comes back with three bottles.
They sit there, drinking. Elise should go home, but she isn’t standing up.
Late at night, Elise has watched them bring home girls in gowns (that drag the dead leaves on the ground) and big tuxedo jackets over their shoulders. Or a girl in a kilt will lean her bicycle against the porch railing and sidle inside on golden afternoons. The boys leave early for classes, hair damp and combed, the world moody with sleep. They wave to the elderly landlord shoveling snow from their walk.
“Well,” Matt says in a disingenuous voice. “Bedtime for me.”
She’s also watched Matt shadow Robbie down the sidewalk to amuse his Ray-Bans-and-Shetland-sweater buddies, without Robbie realizing it (in fact after he’d waved hesitantly to them as he passed), Matt mincing his steps and hanging his wrist, making his face fey and pathetic.
“Guess we’ll see you around,” Matt says to her forcefully.
“Sure, yeah.” Elise lights a Newport King. She stands to blow smoke in his face. “And if you ever get near my friend Robbie again, let alone make fun of him like I seen you do, I’ll burn your motherfucking house down.”
The blue smoke hangs, waiting, and she looks at him, her eyes half-lidded and suddenly red, deadened. The tiniest smirk touches her mouth.
“I’m sorry, what?” Matt says shrilly.
“You heard me,” Elise says, mission accomplished but now having to control her voice from shaking.
“Are you coming into my house and telling me what to do?” Matt pushes her shoulder, testing the moment.
Elise looks at where he touched her then raises her head to stare at him.
“Okay, Matt. I don’t think so,” Jamey says, moving between them.
“She’s out of here,” Matt says to no one.
“You’re fucking correct about that,” Elise snarls.
Matt points Elise toward the door. “All right, let’s move.”
“I’ll go as fast as I wanna,” she says.
She glances back to lock eyes with Jamey, who—with a mystified half smile—is watching her leave.
Elise lies in her dark bedroom, ashing into a Dr Pepper can next to the mattress.
She’s the uncommon baby left in a crib that consoles itself, that can stare for hours at the ceiling. Most people need to sleep once the lights are off, the sex over, and Carson’s said good night; something’s wrong if they stay awake.
Elise never separates things into day and night, rarely thinks about being a boy or girl, or alive or dead. Without divisions, there’s less work to do. She floats, free in a cheap and magic way.
She happily replays what could have happened. She comes from fighters—her mom can drive a stick shift, smoke a cigarette, drink a soda, put on mascara, and deliver a smack to every member of the family without taking her eyes off the highway. Elise could knock that kid’s teeth out with a single swing.
She grins into the dark, walks herself around the ring with one arm raised.
But it’s the dimpled one, Jamey—she didn’t know he could exist until tonight; it’s like she was watching a jet cross the sky then realized it’s a bird. She has to reorient herself.
She didn’t leave home last summer with a plan. Twenty years old, she never finished high school, she was half-white and half–Puerto Rican, childless, employed at the time, not lost and not found, not incarcerated, not beautiful and not ugly and not ordinary. She doesn’t check any box; her face has Boricua contours and her skin is alabaster.
She left her family and everything she knew the morning after a Sunday barbecue in June. They’d all taken over the grill and picnic tables in the Bridgeport park, the Sally S. Turnbull projects looming in the near distance but far enough away to forget for a few hours.
They sat hunched, swatting at black flies, laughing till they cried. Boom boxes, hot dogs, jean shorts and half shirts, Lay’s potato chips, cherry soda, and sunshine that fried their brains and hearts. It was a rapturous last supper. She left the housing unit at dawn, when everyone was sticky with hangover. She walked out the way girls do in campfire stories, heeding a knock on the door that no one else heard, and vanishing.
And she hadn’t known why till now. Oh, sweet mercy, now she knows.
New Haven is a skinny, sallow cousin to New York City; it’s a town that pretends not to want anything or to need charity. This morning is like most others as the place tries to wake up and get presentable, spilling bums from the alleys, sending parolees to stab litter into a bag, sucking raccoons into drains.
Jamey glides through the cold cityscape, and there are ideas in him, fermenting, the heat of them purring from his mouth.
He walks down the sidewalk behind an old lady leaning into the winter sun. Her plum wool coat is open. Passing, he sees the York Peppermint Pattie of a mole on her jowl.
“Good morning, ma’am,” he says, searching her eyes for consciousness.
She doesn’t answer.
And he wonders if he meant what he said, if he cares what kind of morning she has. Or if it’s just another empty thing he says out loud, a candy wrapper dropped into the street.
In the park, hardy men play speed chess.
The day is warm enough to melt icicles out of trees, making a rain that comes down when it wants, a rain more animal than mineral, a rain with a will, a sentience.
Jamey sees portals—the bubble window of that van, the unlit storefronts, the grate where the gutter ends—his subconscious hunting for patterns since it can’t find meaning.
Sometime later, he finds himself drinking coffee from a paper cup, sitting on the steps of a random synagogue. He jumps to his feet, as if he just awoke, surprised to be there, amazed as usual at where he ends up when he hasn’t intended to go anywhere.