Joanna Ruocco
Four years ago, I was released from a long hiatus in my life and moved to the city nearest the town where I was born. I found old friends who shared an apartment, and I asked if I could sleep on their couch until I found a place of my own. It was strange to see them again after so much time had gone by, my old friends, Sarah, Allison, and Melanie, my oldest remaining friends. They’d always taken their failures personally, and they lived together out of the same profound lack of confidence that made them at first so welcoming as they tried to assess whether I was still significant. In high school, they’d derived some benefit from our childhood association, because my wildness, which didn’t include them directly, nonetheless introduced a whisper of doubt about their subordinate status. Maybe it was an act, their flinching acceptance of insults large and small, their pathetic eagerness to attach themselves to other girls as servants and go-betweens. They seemed so dull, so cowed, but maybe they were simply exhausted, as I was exhausted, sleepwalking through the halls, because, at night, they became unmanageable, danced through their shoes, like in a fairy tale. The four of us lived in those days over the mountain, a part of town far enough away from the high school that rumors could circulate freely about gatherings at the bat caves, at the quarry, in the woods, without anyone from down below, in the village center, able to say with certainty which of us did what, where, with whom. Over the mountain was a different world. There were thru-hikers in lean-tos, and itinerants who followed harvests across the country—raking blueberries or seaweed, picking apples, cutting lake ice—in bunkhouses behind the farm stand, and troubled youth from a city group-home in yurts between the meditative statuary on the grounds of the intentional community, and all of them were willing to swim at night, to jump off the quarry cliffs, to trespass and build tall fires. I loved among them widely and immoderately. It didn’t take Sarah, Allison, and Melanie long to determine that none of that mattered now. There was nothing romantic about my return and the reality of it made my absence lose its tragic aura.
In the very beginning, they played host. They folded a towel and sheets and stacked them for me on a cushion of the couch. They showed me apples in the crisper and a bag of rice cakes in the pantry, foods they remembered my eating on the school bus. They asked me questions and modulated their belligerence by lowering their voices, exchanging glances with each other beneath drooping lids. I responded with long, irrelevant anecdotes, scarcely listening to what I was saying, often addressing them by one another’s names. None of them looked like the girl I remembered, and the aspect of their appearances I recognized most easily they all held in common, a softness that took the stamp of whoever behaved most forcefully in their presence. Talking to them, I could see my contempt molding their features, their faces hardening into masks of disgust. They all worked extra hours at their jobs, not because they were vital to the operations of the offices that employed them, or because they needed bigger pay checks—they split one rent three ways—but because they had no better solution to the problem of existence.
Isn’t it all unbearable?
That was the question they were asking, displaying their lives to me and waiting, eyes lowered, for a final judgement.
Haven’t we worked hard to make it so?
After work, they ate unappetizing meals in the kitchen with their cheeks on their hands. The apartment had an open plan with a clear line of sight between the kitchen table and the living room couch. I rarely said anything, but my silent presence intimidated and oppressed them. They started to carry their plates into a bedroom, to spend all the time they weren’t at work in one of their bedrooms. I imagined them sitting on a bed with plates in their laps, chewing stolidly, or staring dully at their phones, or commiserating in low self-righteous tones about the difficult situation in which they found themselves. Used. Put upon. Manipulated. No credit. No respect. Give, give, give. After all she did to us. After all she did period. Not only to us, obviously. We were lucky, unscathed, relatively speaking. Too compassionate. Too generous. Hasn’t learned her lesson. You’d think, after so many years, some acknowledgment. An apology. So selfish, self-involved. Doesn’t deserve. Looks down on us. Give her everything. And in return? It was true I didn’t appreciate their company, their apartment, their couch. They weren’t doing me a favor letting me stay with them but fulfilling a lifelong imperative to justify their bitterness, which I knew preceded every humiliation and in fact made them crave it. I didn’t look for my own place to live, or a job. I didn’t get up off the couch more than three times a day. I felt happy with my old friends: unappreciative, contemptuous, comfortable, entirely at home. They had to pass through the living room to get in and out of the apartment and they did it quickly, furtively, hands shielding their faces, like actresses pursued by the tabloid press.
No one’s chasing you.
If I was awake, I called after them.
Slow down.
One night—it was dark in the living room, blinds drawn over the windows, but it might have been a weekend day—I heard hissing and opened my eyes. As far as I knew, my friends had no pets, but, in my half-asleep state, I saw a snake by the coffee table, fat coils, diamond head. They come up through the pipes. The snake was immobile, drugged by the heat. I turned over on the couch, and I heard the hiss again, overhead. The air had changed. I could taste its sweetness in the back of my throat and my eyes were watering. The air was dewy with the scent of gardenia, or honeysuckle, the overwhelming scent of porta-potties lining a berm at the end of a meadow requisitioned for a music festival. There was a sloshing, clicking sound, my old friend—Sarah, Allison, or Melanie—shaking the aerosol can, and the low furious hiss came closer so I put my face in the pillow, but the perfume was already everywhere. Something hard tapped the back of my skull and cold liquid spread through my hair.
You could shower instead if you don’t like it. We’re not stopping you.
This assault prepared me for the next phase. I knew it was coming, a critical shift. I clung to the couch, my body breaking out in cold dew, sickly sweet, but there was something inside me that understood, clearly, despite the thoughts swimming in my head, drowning in the scent of gardenia, that I had moved to the city for some other purpose. When my old friend—hours or days later—pulled the blinds so they snapped up and gray light filtered into the living room, I sat up without surprise.
I saw your father, she said. For once, she looked impervious, her features heavily made up, even her nose, which had been thinned by dark shading coming down from the inside corner of each eye. I’d recognize him anywhere.
I ignored her wheedling tone. This friend—it was Melanie, the makeup gave her a cracked china-doll version of her little girl face—didn’t deserve to be praised. Who was more recognizable than my father?
But Jean said … I’d heard a rumor—from a friend of my mother’s—that my father had moved much farther away. Of course, years had passed. He might in those years have built a whole new life in another country, and then returned.
Jean? From the post office? Didn’t she die of ALS?
I could tell from Melanie’s frozen smile that she considered my protestation distasteful.
If you can’t be mature about it, she said.
No, no, I said. It’s all water under the bridge.
Melanie took me to see him at the restaurant he owned right around the corner. The neighborhood was unfashionable, and the restaurant, small and opulent, played off the dingy surroundings, the metal door in the bleak façade swinging open to reveal my father’s inspired carpentry, handmade wooden tables with chairs and benches cut from tree stumps, each table embowered in young birches, and in mosses trained up the exposed brick of the wall and hanging down from the ceiling. I could see in every detail the egotistical whimsy that made my father an utterly captivating figure, impossible for an unimaginative woman like my mother, or a gloomy child like me, to capture in turn. Melanie spoke quietly with a young server in a brown unitard, then took my arm.
He’s not here, she said, dismissed and crestfallen, pushing me toward the door.
Of course, he isn’t, I said and pulled free, seating myself at a table. My father, unless he had changed completely, kept no schedule, working only when it pleased him, in intuitive bursts. Any business he owned was doomed to failure. I doubted that he owned the restaurant, which appeared to be flourishing, filled with interesting, attractive people who’d made the pilgrimage from more culturally sophisticated neighborhoods to photograph themselves with mosses. My father was amusing himself with someone else’s money, maybe the dancer’s. He’d left my mother and me for a woman from the intentional community, a dancer who taught the troubled youth from the city group-home how to shapeshift into dragonflies. They would show me the accelerated life cycle, molting with shoulder rolls and hip thrusts then running in circles with their arms held out straight, their gestures sardonic but beautiful. Surely, this unselfconscious, shapeshifting dancer came from a fortune for which she had no use, as a dragonfly.
You never understood him, I reminded Melanie as she joined me. I pulled my napkin roughly from its birch bark napkin ring and flapped it in the air before spreading it across my legs. The least we can do is stay for dinner.
The menu showed my father’s touch as well, riddling descriptions, no prices. First, Melanie’s food arrived, angel hair pasta and fiddleheads in butter sauce, and an hour later, my food arrived, a grilled puffball stuffed with pine nuts. We split a bottle of sparkling maple sap. The bill was enormous. I handed it to Melanie and she gave her card stiffly to the server, eyes fixed on the butter congealing in her shallow bowl.
Will you move in with him now? she asked, drawing an uppercase A in the butter with the back of her fork. I examined her closely. Could it be Allison, I wondered, not Melanie, sitting across from me, lips turned down, shining with grease? But no, it was Melanie, the most dispiriting of them all. She was drawing the A for my father, Angelo.
I haven’t decided, I told her, gratified that whatever pleasure she took in my departure would be poisoned by her envy. Wasn’t it Melanie who had tried the hardest to win my father’s affection as a child after her own father betrayed her by giving his kidney to her younger brother? My father, whole and glowing, swollen with muscle, would never do such a thing.
My body is a temple, he liked to say. It didn’t even extrude dead proteins. His baldness was a sign of his inveterate health. He once told all of us at my birthday party that we should also drink our first urine of the morning. Remembering this as I sat in the gold-tinted light of his restaurant made me burst into laughter.
He arrived as we were leaving, and I embraced him, feeling his heavy muscles clench, his hands patting my back lightly in bewilderment.
Melanie, isn’t it? he asked. I released my father to look at her, but she was vanishing back into the restaurant, neutralized by her own timidity. Meanwhile, my father was dabbing sweat from his eyes with a handkerchief, recovering from a nasty shock.
Everything was to your liking? he asked. It’s an extraordinary place, one of a kind. He opened his arms, not to receive another embrace but to permit my inspection. What do you think? No gray hairs. No aches and pains. I felt better at sixty than I did at thirty.
His face was uglier than ever, bright eyed and appealingly battered, and his bullish neck was so deeply creased as to appear scarred. His hand returned to my back, with confidence, steering me between the birches.
You don’t have somewhere to be? Dessert’s on the house. It’s been a long time. How many years has it been?
The server in the brown unitard brought us each a small wooden pot of something jellied topped with something white, creamed or maybe coddled. I inserted my spoon in the middle and waited to see if it would tip.
Did the dancer pay for all of this? I asked, and my father said, Dancer, dancer … oh, no, you mean Diana? I can’t even tell you when that ended, if it ever began. You remember her? She made an impression, on children especially. Of course, you wouldn’t ever forget her. She gave herself that blue skin on purpose, by drinking colloidal silver, to be more heron-like. She never stopped with the herons. They obsessed her. She wasn’t really a dancer, though. I wouldn’t call her that. There wasn’t any technique. I’d say it was more of an illness. No, I lost touch with Diana. I don’t talk to anyone from over the mountain anymore, although this restaurant owes a little debt to my life there, the landscape at least.
He ate a small spoonful of dessert.
To save us embarrassment I said, I live with old friends but we rarely discuss it. I’m not in touch with my mother. I don’t know what happened to her.
He rubbed his bald head with his palm. He’d always treated his head like a divinatory tool, and sometimes he’d allowed me to use it, bending down so I could place my hands wherever I wanted on the crown.
Nothing happened to her, he said. A woman like your mother? Nothing happens to a woman like that.
I saw my mother, suddenly, as he saw her, a lead balloon rolling on an unalterable track. She might have crushed him—for all his overdeveloped musculature, he was much smaller than she, and more fragile—except that he had flung himself to the side. I had been graceless, less agile. For me, there had never been a chance of preservation.
He continued to rub his head gently. His chef’s jacket was white with birch bark buttons. Over his shoulder, I glimpsed the server in the brown unitard hovering protectively.
Is that all? he asked, eager and impatient. What else? I’ve done plenty since I saw you last. I’ve always thrown myself into projects. Even when I lived over the mountain, which was a difficult time for me, a very difficult time, I was building a house, with nothing, practically nothing. I didn’t even have a ladder. I made a ladder out of boards, and when I needed those boards, I took the ladder apart.
I sat silent and uncertain, trying to communicate my gratitude but instead communicating, I sensed, the extent of my failure. His eyes filled with tears as he removed his hand from his head.
Well, eat your dessert, he said. It’s detoxifying. I don’t mean to offend you, but I can see how coated you are in toxins. Your eyes, your skin. Of course, your hair.
It was his formality that offended me and made me beg, as I used to beg, for his forgiveness.
I made a mistake, I said. I wanted to evaporate but …
The restaurant was still filling with guests, many of whom smiled at my father as they were escorted past. I heard a man say to his companion, We might be in luck. My father stood.
That’s why you’ve ended up like this, he murmured. His fingers brushed the front of his jacket, the birch bark buttons.
It’s easy enough to look past it, he said kindly, eyes caressing the mosses on the wall behind me. How he loved his little artificial forest, manicured and static, a watering hole for the city’s most beautiful creatures.
Wait, I said. Do you need help? I picked up both wooden pots and followed him to the kitchen. I can come every night.
My father had begun to speak to a much younger woman with a pale blue crew cut, about the trees.
They’ve kept their original orientations. If you turn them, they get confused. I wouldn’t want my trees to feel lost. Have you ever been in a lost forest? It’s nothing like being lost in a forest.
I watched them standing together, my father enjoying himself again, his head glowing golden in the tinted light, the much young woman a mauvine shadow.
Have you? she asked. I set the pots down gently on the floor, so they wouldn’t look over and look through me, my father and his accomplice.
I stole soundlessly through the restaurant, but I returned the next night, and the next, bussing tables slyly, when it suited me, my efforts—half restless entreaty, half sabotage—ignored by the staff, and by my father himself. I became accustomed to this invisibility. Everyone in proximity to my father reacted with giddiness and loss of peripheral vision, and he, too, was dazzled, wandering the restaurant in his white jacket, stroking his own head with trembling fingers, as though to confirm a miracle.
I could have continued indefinitely—stuck in this phase—living with my old friends and working in my father’s restaurant, but, one night, after the dinner rush, I removed a moss-lined basket of seeded crackers and a birch bark cup of berries from a table of boisterous environmental lawyers and deposited them in front of a woman sitting alone. Broad-shouldered and completely bald, she transfixed me with her lashless eyes. This woman—she was so utterly and distinctly my father’s daughter. She saw me, but did she recognize me, what I was? She held a large black dog on her lap—its legs and haunches kept sliding off her thighs—and began to feed it crackers from the palm of her hand.
Has someone taken your order? I asked.
No, but it’s fine, she said. I don’t like the food here.
She handled the black dog roughly, and as I stood staring at her, she grabbed one of its legs and forced it up, bending it so the dog yelped.
I can’t keep her another night, she said, stroking the dog’s short, glossy fur down the length of the spine, without apology or affection, a mechanical soothing.
The dog? I asked.
I can hardly bear to look at her, let alone touch her, she said, looking at me, spreading her legs wider to accommodate the dog, but the dog continued to slide, which triggered the same rough handling followed by the same detached soothing.
You should put her down, I said. People are noticing.
But it wasn’t true. No one in the restaurant seemed to notice the drama playing out in the corner with the woman and the dog, despite the dog’s size and the yelps, which were intermittent but piercing.
I still love her, said the woman. That’s why it’s so painful.
Edging closer to the woman, studying the thick skin of her face, I couldn’t help but think she was older—not younger—than I was, but how was that possible? My father’s life was divided into two portions—the portion before he left, the larger portion afterwards. The portion before had always felt like my property, surveyed and mapped. I knew it intimately. This daughter could only be younger. I studied her for some sign of youth, a freshness of any feature, the full mouth, perhaps, but the lips sagged. Her skin, under the tinted light, appeared saffron-yellow, firm but inelastic.
I always thought she was a present from my father, said the woman. We’d just moved to the city, and he could tell I was angry, and lonely, so he went out and got her, my Clairdee. I call her Clairdee, from Clair de Lune, or Ceedee, or Ceedeelee. Even though she’s black, you can see her at night, in the dark, her silhouette at least, like a silver line is drawn around her. My father taught me to crack an egg into her food, that brightens her coat. I came home one day, and instead of finding the apartment empty, like usual, I found her waiting for me, on the couch in the living room.
The mechanical stroking continued. There was only one other person whose eyelids I’d observed so fully. I watched the thick folds of skin slide over the eyes. The rounded edges were slightly callused. My father too had calluses in this strange place. Without eyelashes to protect the fragile skin, it dried out and chafed.
But do you know what happened? After all this time?
I shook my head, hovering by the woman’s chair.
Clairdee, do you know? She lowered her head, speaking closer to the dog’s ear. Did you understand what she was doing? You don’t like her, do you? She smells vinegary, doesn’t she? You hate the way she smells.
She raised her head.
I came home and my mother was on the couch with Clairdee’s head sticking out between her knees, out from under her housecoat, and she was screaming and panting, and I had to drag Clairdee down onto the floor by her paws. Her fur was soaking wet. I dragged her to my room and shut her inside and ran back to my mother. She’d always told me that Clairdee was disgusting, that I didn’t keep her clean enough, that I shouldn’t let her sleep in my bed, but she was crying on the couch with her housecoat flipped up so I could see her bare knees all red from Clairdee struggling out. What is this? I asked. What is this? She was crying all the fluid out of her body, giving me her cringing look, like she’d been beaten but no one raised a hand to her. We don’t touch her if we can help it. I left her on the couch, the old, filthy, soaking wet couch. She won’t get rid of that couch. She thinks it’s the most comfortable thing on earth.
The mechanical stroking went on and on.
I can smell it, she said. It’s on Clairdee, it’s on my fingers. I can’t stand it.
I could hear my father’s loud voice. He had emerged from the kitchen to joke with a table near the back of the restaurant.
It’s so simple though, I said. Simple jealousy. There’s no need to make a scene.
Do you know, said the woman, my father’s daughter, I used to look down at Clairdee and feel an ache. It felt like the memory of pushing her out of my body. Now that makes me sick, that memory.
You don’t look sick, I said. You look healthy. Can I ask … your hair …
It never grew. Her smile was disdainful. You don’t look well at all. You look quite ill, in fact. You’ve spent too much time in this restaurant. Have you looked in a mirror? Your skin is peeling in sheets, just like that birch bark. And your hair is dead as that moss, dry bits matted together.
I backed away from her smile and bumped into a tree. I stumbled and hooked my arm around it, swinging in a half circle and stumbling forward, into another tree, grasping the powdery trunk with both arms, twisting it as I twisted around it. There was the sound of wood and wire snapping. I reached the floor, first with my elbow, then with my cheekbone, and lay on the boards looking up at the lopped crowns of the trees against the slatted ceiling.
Your heart is beating, whispered my father, close to my ear. It’s very slow but it’s beating. I can feel it.
Another voice dropped down out of the noise overhead.
Is she alive?
And my father said, She’s had a bad shock, but she’s alive now. Has someone called an ambulance?
The gold-tinted light had shifted. The air was blue and intimate, already inside me, shivering with every strong contraction of my heart.
At the hospital, the nurse spoke with unemotional warmth.
I’m going to lift your left breast with the non-palmar side of my hand, he said, lifting, moving clockwise around my torso, applying gel, slapping on the round stickers and attaching wires.
What’s your name? I asked him, because the clinical quality of his joyousness impressed me, as did the way he worked entirely with his knuckles, but he hurried from the room without responding and I shut my eyes.
Did anyone come with me? I asked later, but the new nurses, much sadder, didn’t answer, and when the cardiologist arrived, later still, with my father, I felt surprised. They knew they made an impression walking into the room together, these handsome men, one tall, slender, olive-skinned, dark-haired; the other short, muscular, golden, hairless. My father held out his hand.
Steady as a rock, he said. I could have been a surgeon.
Do you want to operate? The cardiologist turned to me. Should we let him?
He laughed, and peered into my eyes and touched my neck and my chest with his fingertips.
The thing is, he said to my father, she doesn’t need an operation. Her heart is healthy, extremely efficient, with an excellent aerobic base, the best I’ve ever seen.
Then to me, he said, smiling, You must be a runner.
Oh no, I said. Quite the opposite.
Don’t lie to me. You’re a record-setting runner, said the cardiologist, wagging the glistening tip of his finger in front of my face. You’re going to run right out of here, I can tell.
He laid the fingertip again on my chest.
There’s so little wear and tear on your heart, he said. It’s beautiful, in mint condition. We should let him open your chest so we can all hold your perfect heart in our hands. Of course, I’m joking. I promise you we won’t operate. You can laugh. Go on. It’s important to have a sense of humor.
He brought his head closer to my chest, listening.
Sometimes, he said, softly, I can’t help myself. I fall a little in love with a heart. Ask my first wife. That’s another joke. Go on now. I want to hear you laugh.
I shut my eyes against the blue light. The hospital sounded very like the restaurant, servers bustling to restore order after the dinner rush, my father’s laughter mingling with the laughter of strangers. My chest was sticky with dropped dessert and dead leaves stuck to it and snapped wires from the crowns of trees. I was filled with nervous energy, a visceral feeling, finite and terrifying, and I exploded up against the weight that held me down.
When I was released, I went back to my friends’ apartment and paced the empty rooms. There was no returning to the restaurant. I found the metal door locked, the windows hidden behind roll-down security shutters. I circled the block and circled again, then I made a bigger circle. I don’t know how many weeks later, I bumped into Melanie, heavily made up, pressed against a tall, handsome man whose arm came around her. They were exiting a restaurant by the park. Melanie tried to push past me, but I greeted her like the old friend she was and the man pulled her back, smiling. She had no choice but to chat on the sidewalk, first about over the mountain and then about the neighborhood, the man looking on pleasantly, playing with her hand.
My father’s restaurant failed, I said, sooner than I’d intended.
You say it as though he’s in some way to blame, she said.
It was a warm night and she was sweating, which loosened and brightened her makeup. Her face was lurid in the streetlight.
Well, he’s hardly a businessman, I said, searching the man’s eyes for a sympathetic spark, in case he understood such things.
Melanie was shaking her head, and then she pulled her hand free from the man’s, an unexpectedly violent gesture, and embraced me. She wasn’t thin but her flesh was tight and peaked as bones. She smelled like hard green apples, a chemical scent that dried the inside of my throat, triggering a gag reflex I barely suppressed.
Did you bother to ask what happened? she whispered and I could feel her lips opening and closing against my ear, smearing my ear with her greasy lipstick. A girl killed herself. She hanged herself from one of the trees. If she hadn’t managed to break her neck, she wouldn’t have gotten away with it. It happened quick. It’s not usually so quick, but she climbed onto a table and …
Just as abruptly she let go of me and stepped back, breathing rapidly and clutching at the man, whose smile broadened with pleasure.
Whose fault is that? I followed them down the street, but only to the corner. They stepped off the curb confidently, the man raising his free hand to stop the oncoming car, his voice as he spoke to Melanie drifting to me indistinctly on the warm air. I turned away, running again on my route, kicking my legs, my skin wet with exertion, a substantial body with an excellent aerobic base, ready to move on with her life.
Joanna Ruocco is the author of several books, including, most recently, The Week (The Elephants of British Columbia), Field Glass (Sidebrow Books), written with Joanna Howard, and Dan (Dorothy, a publishing project). Her novel, Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. She also works pseudonymously. Under her current nome de plume, Joanna Lowell, she published Dark Season, a Gothic romance. She is an assistant professor in the English Department at Wake Forest University and chair of the board of directors of the independent, author-run press Fiction Collective Two.
