My phone chimed. Lily:Text me back! What’s going on? We were supposed to talk …
How could I face her now, when everything I said, everything I saw, might be completely wrong? It chimed again and I picked it up to turn it off, but the text wasn’t from her that time. It was the man who had given me the burns.
I felt a pang of dread reading his message, but ignored it. I thought about the money Des took, about what it would take to start over again. I couldn’t go to my mother, but I also couldn’t stay—I would think of the marsh every single day, of those women, whether they were really there or not. Luis, skulking through the grass. Wondering when Luis would come back and find me, ready to punish me for what I knew. Wondering who he’d take next.
One night, $500. The betrayal foretold in my reading had already come true. The money I had hoarded was gone; Deshad been the last person I could count on. Maybe there had to be real, physical pain before I could be free. For the price of one weekend, I could be away from Luis—his staring eyes, and whatever was in him that wanted to hurt. I could be free of Des—her moods and her pills and the bitter way the corners of her mouth turned down. I texted him back and asked where we should meet.
JANE 6
MY MOTHER WAS OBSESSED WITHmy hands.Clean fingernails are a sign of godliness, she would say. I was to wash them twice every time I went to the restroom or if I went anywhere public or outside. Even when I walked to the mailbox and back. When I was old enough, I rebutted her—but only in my mind. Clean fingernails are a sign of a life unlived. A sign that you are a statue, an object. Lifeless. Inert.
For my birthday, she always gave me soap, lotion, scrubs rough with sea salt. My brothers got basketballs and baseball gloves. My childhood was from another time—I knew other girls didn’t live this way. Preserved, scrubbed into purity. They didn’t go to church for half a day in a dusty old grain warehouse forty miles east, where there was no heat, no air-conditioning, and a former car salesman who called himself Pastor Roy stood on an overturned milk crate and preached himself hoarse, folding chairs creaking and squeaking as we all shifted our weight, uncomfortable and bored. Afterward, the same group of women, my mother included, fluttered up to the pulpit to give him biscuits, cookies, cakes, flushing like schoolgirls. Desperate for approval only he could give.
By the time I turned thirteen, my mother insisted on smelling my hands before she would let me leave for church, studyingthem close enough that I could almost feel the flutter of her lashes when she blinked, then pressing my fingertips to the base of her nose. One inch lower and it would have been a kiss, and those years would have unraveled so differently. One fucking inch can be all that divides love from pain.
“Blood,” she said, spitting the word like a bad taste, dropping my fingers so that my hands swung back, thudded against my thighs. She had probably noticed my pads in the wastebasket, carefully wrapped in toilet paper, so that my father and brothers didn’t have to see them. And still I’d get sent to the sink, scrubbing until my knuckles were raw. Then my hands actually did smell of blood from all of the little cracks in my skin. My mother thought an ability to endure pain was a sign of godliness, too. At least in a woman: Pleasure corrupted. Pain improved.
My brothers went to church with dirt darkening the creases of their palms. Maybe the three of us could have been aligned, at some point, but her attention separated us, made them sheepish around me, me resentful of them. We couldn’t look at one another, or if we did, our eyes met in startled gazes, as though we didn’t know one another very well.
I DIDN’Tdo the things I did with men to get back at my mother. But her anger, her bitterness, was how I knew what to say when I met with the kind of man who wanted to be punished, who wanted the spike of my stiletto thrust into his back or to crawl across the room on his hands and knees. Those men had the freedom to crave that kind of disdain because their whole lives they had been told how good they were, how treasured and perfect and adored. Their lives kept bearing them up, granting them promotions and money and beautiful things they didn’t necessarily deserve. Men for whom oppression was a novelty. I couldn’t imagine a life like that.
I didn’t share their desires, but I respected their dogged pursuit of pleasure, and I tried to honor that. My name was passed around in the right circles, among the bankers and doctors, and for a while, it was as reasonable a way as any to build a life. More reasonable than my mother rushing to Pastor Roy with her jam thumbprint cookies or her apple pies or her goddamned banana bread. When I see her in my mind, she’s always in the kitchen wearing an apron, a red checked tea towel tucked into one of the strings, thinking she’s a better person than everyone else because she never expected anything from her life, not even the smallest bit of joy.
ONE OFmy clients was the first to suggest I’d make a good venture capitalist, or stockbroker, or commodities trader.Guts and smarts.He was right—I liked giving orders, being in charge. He ended up writing one of my school recommendations, called himself my mentor. We laughed about that, after I paddled him until he was bruised, when he was dressed and we could toggle back to our real personalities, or as close to them as we dared.Emily is a fine young woman, ambitious, wise, and driven. I am confident of her success in Rowan University’s business program.To me, he said:Get a job you can put on your résumé. Somewhere you can get a leg up.
That’s how I ended up at the spa. The poetic justice wasn’t lost on me, a place that sold women on sanitization, body-hair removal, slathering themselves in chemicals as a way to “restore the body’s natural pH levels.” All that guilt-tinged bullshit promoted as self-love. But it was the only option in town, and one of the few upscale places where I didn’t need to have completed my undergraduate degree. For a while, it did make me feel like I was a part of something, building something. Clipping the name tag to the lapel of my jacket, pacing the marble floors in the heels I had worn to walk along a lawyer’s spine. I had moved on frommeeting men in hotel rooms with my bag of whips and floggers, elbow-length gloves and garters with their fussy little clips. I was surprised by how much I missed the presence of someone else’s ecstasy, facilitating it, controlling it. Giving that up felt like a loss. Not to mention the cash.
Months passed. Two more casinos shut down, and another crop of slot parlors popped up in Queens and the Poconos. The possibility that I would get a bonus was close to nil. I was already enrolled in school, queasy at the loans I’d taken out for my tuition, books, my first laptop. Not to mention rent, car payment, gas. I got a UTI and for all of its blather about wellness, the spa didn’t give me health insurance. The prescription alone cost $175.
I told myself I would only meet one man a month—just enough to keep me afloat. I tried to get in touch with my former clients, but after the downturn, the wealthy men I had catered to from the Main Line, from Westchester, had taken their vices elsewhere. I couldn’t blame them.
I started picking up dates at random. Called myself Delilah. My nod to Pastor Roy and his stupid milk crate sermons. To my mother and her avid, searching eyes. My father and brothers for their passive, dumb faces, and the way they pretended not to hear how my mother interrogated me—or worse, looked at me like I deserved it.
I GOTa bad feeling early on, with the last client. I could see him grinding his teeth, the way his eyes kept catching at the cross on my chest. But I thought of the bills, the humiliation of my rent check bouncing, the gas I needed, the loans that had ballooned into amounts so large they didn’t seem real. After inflicting pain on the privileged, I had been naïve about the number of men who might be out there looking for women to hurt. Only once, beforethe last one, did someone lay a hand on me. I told Deidre I had the stomach flu and stayed home until the bruise along my jaw had faded. But that night, as soon as he got me alone, I felt my throat start to close. I was dizzy with whatever he gave me. He watched me touch the cross at my neck. The smell of his car reminded me of the baking soda pastes my mother had used to get stains out of the living room carpet: the smell of rebuke.
You call yourself a good woman? Bullshit.He jerked the chain until it broke, fell between my feet. I didn’t have the strength to reach for it. There weren’t enough words to explain. The cross was a reminder. But not about God. Of course, my mother would have decried as blasphemy that I wore it as a reminder to have faith in myself. To live for me.
When he put his hands around my throat, I tried to scream, but my voice was trapped in my mouth, as though my lips had been sewn shut. And there was so much I had left to do, so much I had to say. I was angry at his anger, his audacity, his desire for my pain. My flesh burned with fury like some self-immolating saint. I kept my eyes on him as long as I could, so that he might see it, feel it. I hoped my rage would brand him, sink into his skin. I wanted it to trail him through the rest of his life, like a ghost.
There was darkness after that. Darkness, water, mud, flies.
I hope when they send me back to my mother, there will be wedges of mud under my nails. My poor mother, who had God and Pastor Roy and clean hands instead of a life. I want her to see that I had at least tried to live.
LILY
I COULDN’T STOP CHECKING MYphone, but Clara wasn’t texting me back. I sent one more text:Clara, please just tell me you’re okay?I wondered if she still believed in what she’d said, now that she’d had a chance to sleep on it. About Luis, about wanting to leave.And if she was right? What were we supposed to do? My phone chimed once while I was pacing the front porch, but it was only a text from Matthew.You think about it, Lil? I’ll only ask this once …
Not so long ago, I’d spent hours staring at the screen, willing him to reach out to me. It was hard, already, to believe that I had wanted him with such intensity. But what I wanted was a version of Matthew that only existed in my head: Matthew as I would have fashioned him. Penitent and sweet, adoring and humbled. A Matthew capable of remorse. I shoved my phone in my pocket without answering him. Clara would come first.
Two more hours passed and I still hadn’t heard from her, so I biked down the boardwalk—something to burn through the pent-up nerves—locked my bike to the railing across from her shop. TheOpensign was out front—no star in the corner—and I could see someone sitting at the table near the window, a bowed head, bright red hair. I pushed through that stupid beaded curtain and Des stared up at me. She looked like she hadn’t slept.Had something happened to Clara? Was it possible that she had already left?
“Ah, Lily. Come for a second reading? It looks like you have a lot on your mind. Don’t worry. I can help you find the answers.” She reached for her deck of tarot cards.
“I’m just looking for Clara.”
“Oh, thank God,” she said, in a flattened voice. “I’m hungover as all hell.”
“Is she home?”
