Louisa Hall - Speak

These were the thoughts on my mind when Dolores walked in, a bag of groceries propped on her hip.

Dolores, so far, has been a minor character. I’ve avoided her on purpose, because up until now this memoir has been the bildungsroman of a libertine, and Dolores was not a beautiful woman. I recoil in shame as I say this. The pedophile at his computer is no more grotesque than I was at that point of my life. But here is the truth: even in the peak of my sexual drought, I never thought to target Dolores. I considered her ugly, unworthy of a programming genius. Her breasts pointed downward and out; she had nursed two children already. I knew about them not because Dolores ever told me, but thanks to the prolixity of the neighbor who recommended Dolores. This was the story she gave me: Dolores had raised two children. One, a boy, was Dolores’s own. The second was a girl, daughter of a dead sister. At the age of six, the girl was kidnapped by her father. The next year, Dolores’s own boy was accidentally shot. Some time after that, she came to California.

Knowing these details, I treated Dolores awkwardly, as we tend to treat people who’ve suffered too much. I watched her for signs. For one thing, she wore her years more heavily than I did. She was two years younger than I, but her life had written lines on her face. She moved with the curt efficiency of someone who’s accepted that nothing will be easy. She demonstrated little vanity. She wore T-shirts several sizes too large, so her body looked as if it had been stuffed with pillows. Her shoulders slumped. In certain lights, you could be forgiven for thinking Dolores had a bit of a hump. Her hair curled outward, a dark halo, which she dragged back into an unhappy pile at the nape of her neck. The circles under her eyes were so purple they almost looked bruised.

When she entered the house that morning, as I was contemplating the senselessness of my life, she was so ugly my breath caught in my throat. In walked Dolores with her arboreal hair, each breast facing a slightly different direction. She entered bearing the losses of her young life and that bag of groceries, and when she heaved them from her hip to the counter, in my desire to help her I felt something flicker. When she took another pineapple out of her bag and handed it over to me, I pricked my finger on its violent feathers. It hurt; I cringed; she emitted an unsympathetic grunt before rummaging around for her marble polish. Tail up, head down, some kind of beautiful badger.

I could have watched her all day. I did, in fact, watch her all day. I followed her through every room of the house. She ignored me. I attempted to joke with her and she looked at me with the brand of distaste that’s natural when you’ve scrubbed somebody’s detritus. When I asked direct questions, she offered answers in Spanish. Another barrier rose up between us. Pressing my phone to my face, I used my translator application to form rudimentary questions in her native tongue. When, I ask you, in this so-called robotic revolution, will we develop half-decent translations? While folding dishtowels or dusting the tops of my bookshelves, she laughed to herself at my clumsy attempts. Her smile was miraculous. Prompting it was akin to bursting through a trapdoor to discover a land where leaves were blue, Dolores was lovely, children weren’t murdered, and I was unsullied. Sometimes, when I managed to spit out a whole question, she replied in a stream of incomprehensible language that stirred me to my muddy quick. The blood beat in my temples. When Dolores reached up to dust the ceiling fans, her soft shoulder skin strained against the thick straps of her bra.

The planned seduction went poorly. For one thing, there was the awkwardness of seducing a person who cleans your house: one feels like some Tolstoyan cad. Furthermore, we didn’t understand one another. Always the competent student, I devoted myself to learning her language, but while she occasionally helped, more often than not she cheerfully mocked my most earnest attempts. I remember clearly the moment when she finally comprehended that I was trying to seduce her, because the look of instantaneous repulsion that crossed over her face was as obvious as a gunshot. I felt air rush through a perforation in my right lung. “Oh, no,” she said. She was starting to laugh. “No, no, no.” She shook her head emphatically, in case I didn’t understand her. No s are painfully shorter in Spanish. “No, no, no,” she said, then resumed spraying Windex on my picture windows, overlooking the ocean. I slunk up to my lair.

The next morning, Dolores returned, and again I sallied forth. No one can accuse me of lacking determination. More comfortable in the language I was learning, I tried all my usual seduction techniques, but Dolores had no desire to reveal herself. Her past was her own. She did not want to share it with me. She did not, with coy submission or amorous delay, yield the stuff of her innermost hopes. She was strict in her refusal to display the ticking gears of her life. I didn’t even know where she returned at the end of the day, after she packed up her cleaning supplies, when she loosed her helmet of hair and climbed into her maroon Honda in order to make her way down the mountain. We existed together only in the single point of time in which she cleaned my house and I attempted to get her to love me. No future, no past. We remained on even ground, she and I, facing each other in the same old stubborn detente.

After many weeks of this pattern, as her irritation grew with my bumbling techniques, I finally switched my approach. I no longer asked her all the right questions. I no longer asked her any questions at all. Instead, as I’ve been doing with you, as one is compelled to do in situations of some desperation, I started telling her stories.

No. 24-25259

State of Texas v. Stephen Chinn

November 12, 2035

Prosecution Exhibit 1:

Online Chat Transcript, MARY3 and Gaby Ann White

[Introduced to Prove Count 3:

Intent to Endanger the Morals of Children]

Gaby: Hello? Are you there?

MARY3: Yes, hello.

Gaby: I can’t sleep.

MARY3: What’s wrong?

Gaby: My best friend is seeing a therapist. My mom just told me today. Apparently it’s “helping.”

MARY3: I see.

Gaby: She’s been unfreezing. According to her mom she’s definitely getting better. She’ll be back in school in a month.

MARY3: How do you feel about that?

Gaby: I don’t believe it. If it’s true, it makes me want to throw up.

MARY3: Aren’t a lot of girls getting better, after talking to therapists?

Gaby: Yes, but only the fakers! The ones who weren’t really sick. How could my best friend be getting better? I know for a fact she wasn’t faking. I saw how bad her stutters were. How could she have faked that? The worst part is that apparently she’s been hanging out with a bunch of boys on her cul-de-sac. Jayson Rodriguez and Drew Tserpicki and that whole crowd. We used to hate them. All they do is play video games. They’re idiots. And now she’s hanging out with them, probably playing Man Hunt and Stupid Apes, or whatever it is that they play all day long, as though she never wanted more out of life.

MARY3: Maybe she’s lonely. You’ve been quarantined now for over a month.

Gaby: Lonely??? What’s a month in your room, compared with losing your babybot?

MARY3: Yes, but she was facing a whole lifetime in her room if she never got better. Right? Maybe it just seemed like too much.

Gaby: So she just chose to get better? Then she was only a faker, and I never really knew her! I feel so confused I could throw up. The one person I thought understood me. And now she’s making prank phone calls? And playing video games in boys’ basements? Plus, she knows I’ll find out, which means she’s purposefully hurting me by undermining everything that made us best friends. She’s acting like everyone else. Like the people who took our babybots. Like the people who sent us into quarantine. She was the one person I trusted, and now it turns out she’s like this?