The Night Mare
The guy is so obviously a junkie that I know exactly what he is going to say before he says it. Sure enough: “Do you have…different candy in the back?” I pretend not to hear and keep polishing clean swaths on the glass of the display case. “We are not that kind of place,” says Ana Lucía angrily, negotiating the syllables through her accent. She is from the Philippines, but she tries very hard not to sound like it, kind of like my dad is from the janky part of Phoenix but doesn’t like to let it show. “I don’t know who told you we were. Please leave.” The implacable mass of her body stands in stark contrast to the junkie’s pale, deflated form. Where her flesh swells boldly caramel, his is tight and retreated. He crosses his arms over his chest, hunching with his hands in his armpits, and sneezes. “Bless you,” says Ana Lucía. “Get out.” Her light double chin challenges his caving throat. A few months ago, someone could have mistaken me for Ana Lucía’s niece – whiter, but with her thick breasts and hips, her comfortable belly. Now I look more like the sallow man in front of her, though that was never my goal, and I don’t like it at all. I circle and circle my rag against the glass with one hand. With the other hand, I cover the skin under my collarbone that shows above my uniform’s apron. He might be looking for the skinny chick with the scar above her tits. He won’t find me, though, not in front of my boss. He leaves, hands in his pockets. I have recently failed out of my freshman year at Arizona State University and begun working at the Night Mare Drive-In Theater. I’ve been staying at my friend Heather’s parents’ house. She was my roommate in the dorms before I flunked out, and it’s the only place I could think of to go, even though she’s studying abroad in Spain right now, and even though we aren’t
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very close. It beats going back to my parents’ house, anyway. I was invited to sleep in her room, but I can’t, because he has probably slept there, kissed her there, done God knows what to her there. So I’m in the guest room. It’s a nice house in a good neighborhood, and the sheets on the guest bed are a reassuring shade of off-white that Heather’s parents call ecru. But it’s an awkward set-up. I don’t know Heather’s parents very well, and they like to ask polite pointed questions about what I’m doing with my life. Here is what I’m doing with my life right now: I sleep during the day, and I work at night. I can’t sleep during the night, because I’m afraid of the dark. I ride Heather’s bicycle to the Night Mare, where I sweep and scrub and sell junk food to customers. Not too long ago, in addition to the junk food, I also sold an unhealthy amount of drugs for practically nothing to a couple guys loitering outside. It was near the beginning of the summer, on one of my worse days, and I’d just bought more cocaine than any sane person would do in a week from some guy I used to know peripherally in high school. I wanted to just swallow it all, get it all inside me. I had never tried drugs before, not even pot, but I had overheard in the dorm hallways that cocaine made you feel confident and happy. They said the comedown was vicious, but I couldn’t imagine it being any worse than my freshman year, so I bought as much as I could afford with the money I’d saved up babysitting and cashiering. Then I thought better of it and practically gave it away to these two stoner kids I often saw smoking joints during movies. If I had known it was going to be such a big deal, I wouldn’t have done it. Or maybe I would have just charged them more, because for the past few weeks there have been two or three cokeheads lingering around the concession stand, hoping for dirt-cheap drugs, and they won’t go away. They remind me of my dog Shadow when he begged for food during dinner back home. My parents never minded when I gave him table scraps, because it meant I would eat less.
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As I pitch the rag back into the supply closet, Jen comes striding through the double glass doors of the concession building, swirling heat and grit in from outside. In Arizona, in the summer, it’s hot even when the sun has yanked itself down under the horizon. Jen is Ana Lucía’s daughter and my coworker. She giggles. “Lilith,” she says to me. “Have you ever noticed the doors swing both ways? They’re bisexual!” I twitch the corners of my mouth into a smile so she’ll know I heard her. Ana Lucía is not pleased. “Jennifer, why do you say things like that?” “It’s just a joke, Mom,” says Jen. “When you say jokes like that, people think this is a bad place! A place to buy drugs!” “Oh my God,” says Jen, “don’t start blaming that on me again,” and they break into cascades of glottal Tagalog. I dip a mop in a bucket and thrust its mucked ropey head at the floor. The suds spread in shades of gray between the tiles as Ana Lucía and Jen spit hard incomprehensible words at each other. “Fine,” says Jen. “Great. I’ll just work at the goddamn Wal-Mart.” She makes an angry ridiculous noise like a seagull and rushes back out of the concession building toward the ticket booth where Josef, the Night Mare’s fourth employee, is trying to fix the part of the cash register that prints receipts. I know that Ana Lucía hasn’t really fired her. This is just something they do, a tangle of frustration between them that needs to ravel out every so often. Sometimes I see them apologizing to each other afterward, bleary and melodramatic. Cloying as it is, it’s what I probably should have done with my mother. It might have made life easier for both of us after the time I failed my sophomore history class in high school, or the time I told her I never wanted to speak to her again. I keep pushing my mop until Ana Lucía tells me to start popping the popcorn.
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After work, I bike back to Heather’s parents’ house, eerie shadows quavering up at me from bushes and alleyways. The streets smell like dirt and exhaust fumes. I come in through the back entrance and find every room hideously dark. Shutting the bathroom door and flipping the light switch on is like striking up from under deep water to catch two lungfuls of air. I splash water on my face, brush my teeth. Then I sit down on the closed toilet lid and look out the window. It is my favorite window in the house. The glass is warped and obscured, so I can’t see out very well, but it makes the streetlamp outside look like a ray of hot blue light scattering down from heaven. When I open the window, I have a perfect view of the next-door neighbors’ kitchen. Unlike Heather’s parents, the neighbors always leave their kitchen light on at night. If, lying on the ecru spare bed, thinking about things I don’t want to think about, I ever lose my composure in the dark, I know I can walk next door and be bathed in light. I watch the neighbors’ kitchen until the sun starts to rise, and then I crawl into my guest bed. I started off going to bed earlier, sleeping with the lights on. Then Heather called to say that her parents were too uncomfortable to tell me, but I was wasting too much electricity, and I was going to have to start paying for it if I kept it up. So now I wait for the sunrise. Arizona sun is sweltering and merciless. It melts your eyeliner down past your eyelids, cracks your lips like old leather. I hate it, and I hate the desert, and I hate the dryness, but at least it isn’t darkness. When it isn’t dark, I don’t have to think about the way he levered his fingers up under my skirt inside of me, how when I told him it hurt, he kept his hand where it was and pressed his lips against my ear. “That’s adorable,” he whispered. “My little Puritan.” I can sleep when it isn’t dark. ***
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The Night Mare Drive-In Theater is quaintly anachronistic. At the entrance to the parking lot is a ticket booth, over which looms an immense wooden sign. On the sign is a black horse, rampant, mane and tail mercurial, crimson eyes wide. Her hooves look sharp as diamonds. “Night Mare Drive-In Theater!” she growls at customers in whorled red script. Jen has mentioned that Mr. Barton, the owner, was adamant that “Theater” be spelled with the E before the R, the American way. Apparently he did not insist that the theater’s name have anything to do with the movies shown here, because we barely ever play horror movies. Ana Lucía says that without the dark of an indoor theater, they’re just not very scary. The concession building isn’t slick and glossy the way snack stands are at multiplex movie theaters. We have an outdated popcorn machine and a display case filled with cookies and brownies that Ana Lucía bakes from scratch every day before the theater opens. The candy is not in hermetically sealed packages but in voluptuous glass jars. Customers can scoop gumdrops and licorice whips out of the jars into white paper bags. The color scheme is red and black, like the theater’s sign and its night mare. Red and black tiles, red and black tables and chairs. They go well with the iridescence of the candy jars. Everything is very bright, very colorful. It smells delicious, like butter and sugar. There is only one screen at the Night Mare, and it shows three movies a night, at seven, nine-thirty, and midnight. Employees arrive at six in the evening to tidy things up, and leave at three in the morning after tidying things up again. Today, the day after Jen and Ana Lucía’s Wal-Mart fight, Josef is working in the concession building with me. Ana Lucía used to put him in the ticket building all the time, but lately she’s been putting Jen up there instead. I’m sure she suspects the drug rumors are related to him. I sort of miss the bright jittery stream of chatter Jen usually warbles to me as we fill soda
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cups side by side, but at least Josef gives me some peace and quiet. He has a dark beard and is so taciturn that I’m not entirely sure he speaks English. He seems only to speak in numbers and sizes, as if he were a robot computing, rather than a human being. Last night, for example, a young girl in short shorts and too-small sandals asked for a Coke. “Small, medium, large?” said Josef. She chose small, and a small popcorn with butter. Josef, handing over the soda and the popcorn in its greasy paper bag, said only, “Seven eighty-four.” I can’t pinpoint his age. He could be eighteen, or twenty-five, or thirty-two. “Did you know he’s from New York?” asks Jen as we clip our nametags on in the break room. “Who would leave a normal place like New York to come to fucking Ari-zo-na?” “I don’t know,” I say. I wonder what could have sent him out of his hometown and into the desert. Maybe he’s like me; maybe he gets exhausted just thinking about the place he grew up. I’d like to ask him, but I doubt he’d want to talk about it with me. Maybe once we start using non-numerical words with each other, we can move on to the point of personal divulgement where we tell each other about our hometowns. I guess I don’t really blame him for keeping quiet. I don’t talk much either. Josef shows up a few minutes later, and we get to cleaning. I wash the windows, and he mops the floor, and neither of us speaks. This is familiar, cleaning in silence. This is how my parents do things. I think about the time my dad came home from a party one night and shook me awake. “Your mom got drunk again,” he told me. “She threw up in the car. I need you to help me clean it.” He watched me dab at the wine-colored mess with a roll of paper towels, and neither of us said a word.
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Ana Lucía comes in. “Josef. Lilith. I am afraid I have some bad news.” “Did the projector break again?” I ask. “No. I have just received a phone call from Mr. Barton.” Her lips and tongue move precisely around the vowels and consonants. “He says he is closing the theater down.” Josef and I abruptly stop our scrubbing. “He has never made very much money with it, and now he is getting police calling him because they think we are selling drugs here. We are not selling drugs here!” “Of course not,” I say. I keep my face deliberately still. *** I spend the night sitting on the toilet lid, looking at the house next door. A middle-aged woman with blond hair sits at the kitchen table, a blue mug placed before her like a relic of worship. She stares at the mug and does not drink from it. I want to tell her to make herself a cup of cocoa, that the sweetness and smoothness will make her feel better. Instead, I gaze at her and duck out of the window frame whenever her head turns in my direction. I envy the way she can sit in a kitchen so casually. When I was younger, I used to have to sneak into the kitchen in the dark of night, my stomach sharp and acidic. No ever-burning light overhead for me. I would take one saltine cracker, three grapes, a few sips of milk from the carton so as not to dirty a glass. Little snubbed morsels that wouldn’t be missed. My mom didn’t like me to eat too much. “Fat runs in the family,” she said, “and no one likes fat girls. No one takes fat girls seriously.” She called herself fat all the time, bitterly, though she was skinnier than any of my friends’ mothers. Not that I had many friends. Whenever I tried to talk to people, my concentration would come undone with the knowledge of my own ugliness. I knew what they were thinking: Chest too flat. Skin imperfect.
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It was my dad who set down the rule that there would be no eating in the house after eight o’clock. He’s a real estate agent who says he can’t stress how important personal appearance is in the professional world. “What are you doing?” he’d ask, when he found my mom or me in the kitchen at night. “What makes you think that’s okay?” When I got to college, I built secret little fortresses of food in crannies and the backs of drawers. Heather liked to tease me about the way I’d wriggle under my bed to get a candy bar, but I knew that my parents lived less than an hour away. They could drop by any time, and if my food were out in the open, who’s to say they wouldn’t take it away? I could hear my dad’s voice in my head perfectly: “Cookies, Lilith? What makes you think this is okay?” I loved the way my stockpiles of chocolate swelled my breasts and my hips. I stroked the new extra layer of flesh on my stomach lovingly. But it was my newfound rounded ass that Heather’s boyfriend grasped the first time he touched me, and it was while I was bending behind my desk to reach a bag of chips. I pried a laugh out of the silence, my mouth daubing itself into my worst smile, the ugly smile that stretches my nose out. “What was that?” I asked as he stepped closer. No one had ever tried to kiss me, and I didn’t know how to refuse. I spent the rest of the day staring at the same two pages of my psychology textbook, wondering if I should tell Heather what he had done with me. What if she never forgave me? What if she thought I was lying? There was even a little pocket of my mind that was afraid she would laugh at me for hoping I was allowed to draw borders along the edges of my skin. Like maybe that was how the world worked, like maybe men just chose women like fruit in a supermarket. Dropped you in a plastic bag and set you on the kitchen counter for later. The slope between Heather’s parents’ house and the house next door is just steep enough to let me see the floor of the furthest half of the kitchen. It is tiled black and white, an oversized
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chess board. One of those guys who keep coming around trying to buy drugs from me plays chess in the park every weekend. It always surprises me when I see him there on my way home, as if cocaine and chess were inherently at odds with each other. I’m secretly kind of fond of the two or three skeletal cokeheads that keep showing up, their knobby wristbones and collarbones telling me I could be worse off than this, more emaciated. I like the chubby suburban stoners who I sold the cocaine to, too. They remind me of my hidden caches of junk food, my lovely ample body, stripped down now to frailness. *** The next night, Josef and I finish cleaning the concession building early. I take a seat in my favorite of the run-down red-and-black chairs. I finger the stuffing that blooms through a split in the faux-leather seat, and think about what could possibly keep the Night Mare from shutting down. I don’t want Heather’s parents to think I’m a jobless bum and kick me out. I don’t want to go back home and hear my parents talk about how much better I look now that I’ve lost weight. Not to mention I told them I was staying at school for a summer semester, and I’m not particularly eager to reveal I was lying. We could raise concession prices, but they’re already pretty hefty. We could charge more for tickets, I guess, but it’s not like people will want to pay as much as they do at a normal theater to watch lower-quality visuals from uncomfortable lawn chairs or through insect-smattered windshields. Maybe I could go back in time and not sell cocaine to those kids. Yes, perfect. Flawless plan, Lilith. This is all his fault. I would have never wanted to buy all that cocaine in the first place if it weren’t for him. I feel antsy and angry just thinking about him, the way he put his hands all over me, his fingers clutching at my breasts and waist whenever Heather left the room. At first, it
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was just wide-eyed silence on my part. My face went numb, my limbs felt like they were swinging through syrup. But it didn’t take long before I started kissing him back. No one had ever been hungry for me like that before. I have the sudden inexplicable urge to press my fingers down my throat and vomit all over the floor I have just finished mopping. Josef sits down across the table from me. His hands fold themselves on the table like sheets in an orderly linen closet. I find myself avoiding his eyes, which are bright and big and won’t leave my face alone. His still, timid lips, his dark, upward-curving chin. I stare down at a chipped-tooth nick in the table. The silence balloons between us. “You know what they used to do when drive-in theaters weren’t making enough money?” he says suddenly. I look up. “They would play – you know. Girly films.” “What do you mean?” I ask. “Like chick flicks?” “No, like, um. Like soft porn.” I feel embarrassed for him. I want him to leave me alone. His hand comes up to his beard and begins plucking disjointed Morse code rhythms at a patch of hair on his cheek. “We can’t play that kind of stuff here,” I say. “It’s closing down anyway. What have we got to lose?” “All right,” I say. “You go tell Ana Lucía that you want to show everyone porn. Let me know how that works out for you.”
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His hand comes slowly down from his beard. “You’re right. Forget I said anything.” He goes to the supply closet and picks up the litter stick and a garbage bag, shuffles outside to stab trash off the ground. Ana Lucía comes in a few minutes later. “I’ve been thinking and thinking,” she says. “I don’t know what we are going to do.” I look out at Josef. With the litter stick and garbage bag, he looks like a homeless guy with a cane, stalking soda cans to recycle for a few cents’ refund. It’s hard to tell with those homeless people whether they are starving in several layers of clothing, or getting fat on an allMcDonald’s diet. Either way, I’d like to be that padded and protected, that plump. At my plumpest, I was gorgeous, all curves. I closed drawers with my hips, wore shirts with precipitous necklines. I was flirting with boys and getting straight A’s. My parents were happy that I was doing so well. All I needed, they insisted, was to get rid of that pesky freshman fifteen (though it was obvious to everyone that I’d gained more than fifteen pounds), and then I’d be the happiest person I could be. “You’re going to go places in life,” my mother would tell me after a few glasses of wine during the weekends they entreated me to spend at home. “Just wait and see. You’ll be rich, and then you’ll have enough money to do something about that nose of yours.” I just squirreled my candy away and smiled to myself. I’d always thought of my body as a sort of hulking regrettable sack I was obligated to drag around, but when I got my curves, my body became a haven, the citadel where my soul made its home. Warm and soft and lush. So I kissed him back and let my mind curl around old memories: a childhood ballet recital, for which my mom had spent a long time coiling my hair into a perfect bun fastened with bobby pins and a hairnet. I’d felt like an expensive doll in my pearly pink tights and black leotard. As I thought about my parents standing up to clap for my rickety pirouettes, my citadel
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went out from under me almost mockingly. The contours of my body were not mine, but his. They were like an unfaithful spouse; he didn’t love them like I loved them, but they sided with him anyhow. Now I’m skinny as a reed. Jen always tells me she’s jealous of how thin I am. “I’d kill to trade legs with you,” she says, like these stupid little twigs are good for anything. Every now and then I sneak a jelly bean out of one of the Night Mare’s glass jars, but mostly I just look at their bright jolt of colors. It’s really sort of extraordinary the way I can inhale the rich scent of the food and not feel any connection to it, no desire toward it at all. My parents would be proud. I can see them rising from their seats and applauding. *** After overhearing Heather saying to her mom on the phone that she was really in love, I told him it had to stop. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I’ve heard that one before. You’ll give it up before the school year is over.” But I stood firm. I slapped his hands away. I threatened to yell. “Whore,” he hissed, and threw a glass of water from my desk against the wall behind me. It broke with a loud clatter. Heather came running in from the hallway where she had been chatting with one of the girls from the room next door. “What just happened?” she asked. “Nothing,” he said. “I just dropped this on accident. I’ll clean it up.” He bent down and gingerly picked up a handful of shards, dropped them into the trash can. “There,” he said, “problem solved,” but half of the glass still sparkled, denticulate, on the floor. That night, at 1:33 in the morning, a time written forever in my mind as a red stamp on my bedside clock, Heather got a phone call from a friend in tears. “I have to go make sure she’s okay,” she said, and exited the room, closing the door behind her.
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In a few short seconds he was on me. He held my legs still with his own, wrenched down my underwear I strained and brawled but he fastened my arms at the wrist with his horrible massive hands hurt me and hurt me he
my blood was weeping out of me oh I got my teeth into him he let up a
little and I thought maybe I could writhe free oh but something sharp pierced me right under my collarbone just shy of my wild-beating heart at the confluence of my curves of glass from the cup he’d broken earlier oh my blood was weeping out of me her chest) a long fang
and he slit me open hard he marked me like a cow (now they come looking for the girl with the scar on
hurt me and hurt me and I thought maybe if I didn’t move I could keep more
blood inside me and then he vacated me. He gripped a stretch of flesh at my waist and said – oh God – said, “I told you.” I never told Heather. I never told anyone. I washed the sheets. *** A week before the Night Mare is scheduled to close, Ana Lucía leaves Jen in charge and goes to beg for mercy from Mr. Barton. She must not have believed he would actually shut the theater down. Some things you will not, can not believe will happen until you are in the hot bloody middle of their guts. Jen puts me at the concession stand, and tells Josef to work the projector, then disappears into the ticket booth. I am ringing up a bag of malt balls for a middleaged woman with tattooed-on eyebrows when I hear a distant briery cry: “What the hell is going on?” It is followed by more shouts, surges and leaps of angry sound. I shove the woman’s change at her and rush out of the building, into the dusty parking lot where the single screen towers. Some action movie is supposed to be playing, but instead, Gene Kelly is capering in black and white. He spreads his arms and serenades the dozen cars hunched
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beetle-like below him. “I’m getting my money back,” someone announces. I jog back to the concession building, grateful it’s Jen and not me working the ticket booth. Instead of the three movies we were supposed to show, Josef plays a Gene Kelly movie, an Ingmar Bergman movie, and some steamy thing from France. I guess he had to have his soft porn. Jen thinks it’s hilarious, but Ana Lucía is not too happy when she returns to see an artfully shot scene of a torrid threesome on the screen. She doesn’t even know two of the people involved in the threesome are brother and sister, but she fires Josef on the spot anyway. He just brushes his hand over his beard and shrugs. I follow him as Ana Lucía starts in on Jen, who is saying, “Come on Mom, I know you have a sense of humor in there somewhere.” They’ll have it worked out before the sun rises tomorrow. “I told you you were being dumb,” I say to Josef as he gathers his wallet and keys from one of the cubbies in the break room. I lean against the door frame, cross my arms. He walks past me wordlessly. Then he stops and turns around. He says something slightly too soft to make out, like he doesn’t know how loudly to speak to people if they aren’t standing right next to him. “What?” I say. He walks toward me, and I notice for the first time a birthmark puffing timidly out from under his beard. It is the color of the skin around my fingernails when I’ve been biting and peeling at my cuticles. “Do you think pretty girls just get to say that kind of thing to people?” he says. “Excuse me?” “Do you think that just because you’re pretty you can call me dumb? That’s – that doesn’t even make any sense.”
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“Are you making fun of me?” I assume people have mocked my looks before, but never right to my face. I wish Jen were standing here to bear witness to his cruelty, to snarl at him the way she and Ana Lucía snarl, and to invoke the same reconciliation. “I’m leaving.” The bright high tide of his birthmark stands out against the rest of his pale cheek. “I don’t want to be anywhere near you, and I’m leaving.” “You don’t have any right to make fun of me like that!” I yell after him. “You fucking – loser!” Devastating insult, Lilith. I’m sure you cut him to the quick. Back at Heather’s house, I sit in the bathroom and look at the blue veins slithering up my scrawny arms. Soon I’ll have to go door to door at the mall, begging for a job. I will have to turn in applications to even the snotty high-end clothing boutiques. That’s where my mom wanted me to work back when I was content to make my money babysitting. She wanted me to be one of those stylish girls with their impeccable hair and makeup, their outfits sized precisely. The clothes from those stores always clung to me in the wrong places, and lolled awkwardly where they flattered other girls’ figures. Just thinking about trying to get a job in that kind of store makes me feel heavy. Weary. The blond woman who had spent hours contemplating the blue mug enters her kitchen and turns on the light. With her back to me, she sheaths her hands in bright yellow rubber gloves and starts washing dishes. She whisks a sponge over the plates and slides them into the dishwasher, but spends a long time on each delicate champagne flute before carefully placing it in the drying rack next to the sink. Suddenly a cup slips from her hand and shatters on the floor, an asterisk of glass. She pauses. Looks at it. Then she takes all the dishes in the sink and hurls each one at the kitchen floor. Like a volley of grenades, every dirty bowl and mug bursts painfully. I can’t hear the crashing, but I’m sure it’s loud enough to wake up her husband. Sure
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enough, a square-jawed man with lumpy knees walks into the kitchen, wearing plaid boxers and a gray T-shirt. He says something to her, and she says something back. Then he hugs her, and she softens against his chest. Her arms come together around his middle. They sit next to each other at the table, and he puts his hand on hers. They stay like that for several minutes, their mouths flapping silently at each other, until I can’t take it anymore. I should stomp over there and warn her that you can’t trust someone just because he hugs you like that. I should tell her that a boy’s hands over my clothes became his hands under my clothes, that he became an expert at the swift pinning of my body against the wall. How I could feel the stucco hard and unyielding against my shoulder blades, my tailbone. He would spend the night in Heather’s bed, shirt casually unpeeled from his body, arm draped loosely over Heather’s ribs. His naked chest, his uncovered nipples were the most terrifying and magnetic thing I could imagine. I couldn’t sleep when he was there. I would lie on my back and look at the ceiling, and every time he turned over or breathed heavily, I would stiffen up in fear. When you can’t sleep at night, you don’t concentrate well. You spend your daylight hours napping instead of going to class. You remember barely anything you learn. Before I knew it, I had slipped from straight A’s to academic probation. I had also completely lost my appetite for everything but toast with margarine and watered down apple juice. Now I work at night and sleep during the day so I can see everyone and everything clearly. Next time, I want to see it coming. My last day at the Night Mare I do see it coming, see him coming. He and two athletic grinning friends of his drive up in his car, its paint a bottom-of-the-pool shade of blue. Seeing him feels like stepping up at the top of a staircase, putting your foot down and expecting a stair where there is none. I need to vanish. I look around for Josef to cover the counter while I hide in
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the bathroom, and then remember that he’s been fired, the stupid bastard. I start praying, looking up at the tiles on the ceiling, braiding through each other in red and black. He opens the door. The cold, hard atmosphere of the air-conditioned room is punctured and deflates a little. His friends go to the glass jars and pick up paper bags. They ask him if he wants any gummi bears, and he says no. “What do you think of that skinny bitch?” one whispers to the other, but I am almost too distracted to hear. I watch his eyes rake over the cookies in the display case. The fingers on his mammoth hands tap the counter. I am seeing spots. Then he looks me in the eye. He looks me right in the eye and says: “I’d like a medium popcorn and a small Diet Coke, please.” He doesn’t even recognize me. *** We lock up the Night Mare for the last time that night. Jen hugs me and says, “We’ll still see each other all the time. Don’t worry. I’ll call you this weekend. We’ll hang out.” I think it’s nice that she is friendly enough to lie about this. When the phone rings and Heather’s parents hand it to me, I am expecting Jen, pleasantly surprised she was telling the truth. Instead Heather’s voice slides down the phone line as her parents exit the room. “Hey, Lilith,” she says. “Heather,” I say, surprised. “Hi.” “I heard you lost your job.” “Well, not exactly,” I say. “I mean, I didn’t get fired. It’s just that the theater is closing down. I mean, it wasn’t my fault or anything.”
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“Gotcha. Well, so, my parents are too uncomfortable to tell you this, but they said that if you’re not going to be working, they want you out of the house.” There is a moment of silence in which I grope madly for the casual, polite phone voice my parents taught me, that thick layer of icing you can spread over any emotion to make it go down easier. “Oh, I’m leaving tomorrow anyway,” I tell her. “You are?” “Yeah. I’m moving in with this girl I work with. Worked with. We found a cheap little apartment. It’s really cute and everything.” “Wow,” says Heather. “Sounds great.” “Oh, yeah,” I say. “Totally great.” My last night at Heather’s house, the blond woman next-door appears only momentarily. She pulls a cookie out of an orange ceramic jar on the table and leaves, flicking the lights off on her way out. The next morning, I pack my suitcase and drag it to the Night Mare. This would not be a pleasant thing at any time in the state of Arizona, but it is especially bad today. Sweat flowers into the cloth of my shirt. I taste it on my upper lip. In the garish light of day, the night mare on the sign looks rather ordinary. She is wellcrafted, but her eyes are less manic, her hooves more vague. She couldn’t win a race or buck off the cowboy who had dug his spurs into her one too many times. I let myself into the concession building with the key I still have and sit down in my favorite chair, the one with the slit in the fake leather and the overzealous stuffing pushing out of it. The place has not been cleared out. The iridescent jars of candy still stand lined up like ornaments on a Christmas tree. Grease still glistens on the sides of the popcorn machine. The
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bathroom smells like stale urine, but at least the water is still running. The electricity is not. Without air conditioning, it is uncomfortably hot in the building. This is not the best arrangement in the world, I tell myself, but you’re going to be okay. Then night hits. The building stays stiflingly hot even after sunset, and I keep sweating. Josef and Jen and I have not been there to clean, and already there is a film of dust over everything. The sweat and the grime give my skin a scummy, contaminated feeling, and I have to keep washing my hands to get it off. The moonlight on the jars of candy casts skulking shadows that seem to jump in the corner of my eye every time I look away. I pile some clothes from my suitcase into a messy little nest on the floor behind the display case and lie down. The dirt and sweat get me itching, and before long I am scratching up welts on my arms and legs. Just as I am calming myself down with my “you can always kill yourself” mantra, I hear rattling from the entrance, and then, from my position below the display case, I see the top fraction of one of the glass doors as it swings open. Suddenly I know I do want to live after all, and this makes me angrier than I have ever been in my life. For a moment, for just a moment, I want to be home. I want to be holding Henry, the stuffed puppy my parents gave me for my seventh birthday. I want my mother to run her fingernails softly up and down my back and tell me she will make me whatever I want for dinner. I want my dad to go buy ice cream for all three of us, to bring it home looking pink and happy because he got everyone exactly what they wanted. I could be there right now, if I hadn’t lied to my parents about summer classes. I could be safe in my own bed, but instead I am cowering in filth while a stranger creeps closer and closer, because I am stubborn and stupid and wrong and – “Is anyone in here?” says a voice from the door.
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It’s his voice. I would recognize it anywhere. My world snaps into place. He saw me working here a few days ago, and he pretended not to know me so he could come back for me. He has been planning this all along, tacking it up in his mind. He has set one large trap, and he is about to spring it shut. All I know is one of us won’t leave this room, because I am not letting him touch me, not ever again. I would rather kill him. I would rather die. “Lilith?” says the voice again, and before I know what I am doing, I have pushed a candy jar over, broken it on the floor, grabbed a shard of it. I am rushing and hollering, my knuckles and shins careening into chairs and tables in the dark. I kick some piece of furniture out of my way. It moans across the floor and topples thunderingly as I bare my teeth and draw back my arm. The voice says, “Lilith, it’s me, it’s Josef!” And then, abruptly, nothing makes sense. My muscles all unspool, and Josef is holding me up awkwardly at the armpits. I want to cry, but I can’t. Instead I sink my mouth into his shirt and scream and scream and scream with all the air in my billowing lungs. *** As he searches for the circuit breaker with a flashlight, Josef explains to me that he had brought some film reels over to watch by himself. He says nothing about me trying to stab him to death. If he were someone else, I’d assume he was avoiding the topic out of some sense of politeness, but I can’t tell with Josef. “I never made fun of you,” he says. “What?” “You said I was making fun of you.” His hand goes to his beard, and I realize he’s worrying the spot where the birthmark shows. “Oh,” I say. “I thought you were implying…I’m sorry I yelled at you.”
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Josef finds the circuit breaker and flips it. The lights stutter on. “It’s all right, I guess,” he says. “I just didn’t want you to think I was making fun of you.” We sit on the hood of his pale green car and begin watching a movie on the Night Mare’s one screen. My lips feel raw in the arid wind, but at least it’s cooled down some. The metal curves of the car hood bruise my tailbone, until eventually we give up sitting on the car and sit by the projector. The view isn’t as good, but the sound is better. “I’m glad,” Josef says. Then, as if realizing that was an incomplete thought, he adds, “That I found you here tonight.” “I’m glad you found me too,” I say. “When you came through the door, I was absolutely sure you were someone else. I thought you were this guy I used to know. Herman.” “Herman,” Josef says, like he’s just learned a word in a new language. “That’s a pretty dumb name, isn’t it?” I look over at him. “I don’t know,” he continues. “When I was a kid I had a book about a worm named Herman. Squirmin’ Herman.” I start laughing. “I guess it is a pretty dumb name.” “Honestly. I would never name a kid Herman.” On the screen, a chef stains her cutting board and her apron slicing up red bell peppers for a man who is only going to break her heart. It’s in Spanish, and we can barely read the subtitles. “I guess you know why they shut the theater down,” I say. “It wasn’t making any money,” he says. “I mean the stuff about drugs.” “Oh, Christ,” he says. His fingers leap to his beard. “Look, that wasn’t me, I – ” “It was me.”
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He looks away from me, toward the chef in her stiff white apron. I could explain, but I won’t. “I’m going to have to think about that,” he says. After the Spanish film is done, we watch a horror movie about a house haunted by the ghosts of a pair of siblings whose mother starved them to death. It turns out Ana Lucía is right: without the eyeball-pressing gloom of an indoor theater, scary movies just aren’t that scary. The movie ends as the black of night starts washing into purple. The pink and gold in the auroral spectrum hit the night mare on the sign just right. In the gauzy light between night and morning, she looks fierce, harsh, absolutely beautiful.
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