Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

The games we played on Balete Drive passed like a dream, without any fixed rules or reason. We used buttons and shells as playing chips. A glass aquarium sat on the table, filled with coins — they kept calling it the betting pool, but no one kept track really of what went in or out. Sometimes coins were taken from the pool to use as bingo chips as well. One by one, the guests went home and the women went upstairs, until only Will, Jorge, and I remained in the living room.

“It’s a long drive back,” Jorge said. “Alice and I are pretty tired.” That was all he needed to say to his old friend. Will gave us some mothball-scented T-shirts to sleep in. At the kitchen sink Jorge and I cleaned our teeth with red toothpaste and our fingers. Rats had made a nest in a vent along the top of the kitchen wall, and I could hear them shrieking. “It’s an old house,” Jorge said quietly, as if defending it. He spat into the sink and splashed his face with water.

The lights went out.

“Brownout,” said Jorge. “Fuck.”

Without thinking I kissed him, my eyes not quite adjusted to the dark, not finding his mouth right away. Our tongues were sweet from the red toothpaste.

In an upstairs room, we took off our clothes slowly. Trying to keep quiet elongated everything. “I have a really long torso,” I said, and felt my body lengthening to prove it.

“Your torso’s fine,” he said.

I started babbling—“George. Can I call you George?”—not wanting to be silly but not wanting, either, to match his intensity or his seriousness. He shushed me with a thumb above my lip — the place where the scar would fall, on him.

I said, “It’s just that whore-hey, in English, sounds—”

He shushed me again, laughing a little. “I know what it sounds like.” We lay down, and he raised my legs up so my toes touched the wall.

—

In the middle of the night I woke to the whir of a ceiling fan. Electricity had come back to Balete Drive. I got up, found a bathroom at the end of the corridor, and reached for the string hanging from its naked bulb. In the light, I saw the bathroom had no boundaries. A faucet came out of the wall, with a plastic pail, cracked at the rim, under the spout. There was no sink or shower, only a drain in the floor. Two mirrors hung opposite one another: a square one above the toilet tank, and a round one on the back of the bathroom door. I bent down to lift the lid of the toilet seat.

I couldn’t sit on a toilet, in a double-mirrored bathroom, without remembering. The night Sabine died, we had gone to a party on Mercer Street, in a fancy apartment whose owner we didn’t know. It was a triplex, with spiral staircases and a white grand piano in the living room. Someone called me into a bathroom that had mirrored walls, a mirrored ceiling, and a mirrored floor, on which Sabine lay, unconscious. A fun-house bathroom. As I knelt to her, at least four other versions of me did the same. People assumed — and I did too, at first — that she had overdosed on something. That would have been typical, if a little eighties, of a model. But it was nothing so dramatic as that. I picked her up — how many times had one of us done that, when the other was drunk or sick or sad or just horsing around? — but this felt different, her skin already growing cold, her weight a stranger’s weight.

A burst aneurysm, the doctor told me, in the brain. Did I notice the warning signs, they asked: had she complained of blurry vision, feeling weak or numb? “No,” I told the doctor truthfully. I didn’t say we’d both set out that night to get as sloppy as we could, and even if I were to notice that her pupils had dilated or her speech was slurring, I’d have taken it as a sign that we were right on track. I didn’t mention that I’d been sitting in a ghost chair, laughing at a joke told by some guy I was considering sleeping with. Was she a regular cocaine user? Not unless we had money, I said, which wasn’t “regular.”

Essentially she’d had a stroke, which struck me so much as a thing that happened to old people that I thought, at her hospital bedside, Are we old? But it was possible, the doctor said, that she’d been born with this — an inch at most, a weakness on the wall of one of her brain arteries, a thin balloon that after years of growing happened to rupture that night.

It stunned me to lose the person I had known and lived with for a decade to something that was a secret from both of us. We had seen each other through colds and fevers, cleanses and crash diets, STD and pregnancy scares, bad drug trips of the kind some people thought killed her, the mole on her ankle that turned out to be nothing, once she bothered to have it checked out, a lump in my armpit that did have to be excised, as a precaution. She knew that more than one tequila shot made me miserable the next day; I knew that tap water and any less than five hours of sleep made her skin break out like a teenager’s. We’d seen more of each other’s bodies than of any body we had ever fucked, no question.

Not to mention we discussed our bodies, day in and night out: every bone and muscle, every gland and errant hair, was fair game. It’s possible that most girls bring these things up now and then with their close friends. But girls who live or die by their metabolisms, whose reactions to caffeine, herbs, or laxatives can mean the difference between shot-girl double shifts and a thousand dollars an hour just to sit there? We were scientific and exhaustive about it. Sabine would not have been amused that her body kept this information from her, after a lifetime spent studying it. But she wasn’t around to learn the news. I was the one blindsided. It made me wonder what secrets my body was hiding from me, when and where my own flesh would betray me after the years I’d spent getting to know it.

At Sabine’s viewing, someone said if she’d survived the stroke she would have never been the same. This way she got to die young, and be burned forever in our hearts and brains as beautiful. Someone else said, People don’t think beauty’s an accomplishment. Maybe they’re right, but close your eyes for just a moment and imagine this world without beautiful people in it. Is that a world you’d want to live in?

For a while after her death I was convinced that every stiff neck or cramp, every nauseated feeling, every moment of forgetfulness, was a ruptured aneurysm. If I woke up and sunlight coming through the window felt too bright, I thought, Is this it? Am I dying? I still couldn’t accept I was alone, I guess — or that I’d always been alone and now I just knew it. No matter how close we had gotten, no matter how well I knew her, there was this fact of death that set Sabine apart from me forever. The trick her body pulled had made me frightened, frankly, of my own body. I wanted, even tried, to forget I had a body altogether.

When I flushed the toilet now, the water cycled in the bowl slowly and very loudly. The faucet, too, was loud. On the floor next to the plastic pail was a bar of soap, rough as pumice. I washed my hands as quickly as I could. I pushed open the bathroom door and stared again into the square mirror just before switching off the light. Then I heard a rustle in the corridor behind me. Afraid to see another rodent, I closed the toilet lid and sat on top, hugging my knees. My eyes adjusted enough to make out the jut of my cheekbones in the mirror, and a moving silhouette beyond my shoulder.

She was different from the woman I had seen outside the restaurant. This white lady was old. Her hair, long and wild against her shoulders, was the shade of ice. I stood and turned to approach her. At the sleeves and hem of her nightgown, I saw age spots all over her hands and feet. It seemed she had been tall — almost as tall as me, before old age hunched her spine. She was by herself, and not so brown as the women I had seen around the city. I wondered what she would do: turn and flee right then, or run just as I plucked a strand of her frost-white hair as proof? Or would she fade, right in front of me, into the darkness of the empty hallway?