Alix Ohlin - Inside

Anne went to rehearsals, to work, and out for drinks, never once asking Hilary what she did during the day besides housework. After a while, she gave Hilary a set of keys and started leaving out some cash, twenty bucks at a time, for groceries. Now when she came home there was milk and bread and fruit. She didn’t know what else Hilary ate, but the girl had already grown even stockier; she was definitely getting enough food somewhere. Her complexion had cleared up; her hair, shampooed regularly, was shinier, lighter, and she sometimes wore it in two braids. She looked scrubbed and healthy, like a milkmaid, and this farmgirl impression was reinforced when Anne, backstage for an audition one day, stumbled on an unlocked wardrobe room and brought back some baggy overalls and plaid shirts that Hilary wore without complaining or even asking where they came from.

Neither of them asked the other any questions. Anne assumed Hilary had run away from home, and in her experience, kids who did that usually had good reasons. And though Hilary had marched right into Anne’s apartment, she seemed to have a second sense about invading her privacy otherwise. When Anne came home from work she often went straight into the bedroom, and Hilary never bothered her. The few clothes Hilary now owned were kept in a milk crate beside the couch, with the blanket she slept under folded on top. Sometimes days would pass without them exchanging a single word.

Anne stopped bringing men home, a little hiatus that was nice at first, giving her a feeling of astringent purity and asceticism. But she soon decided that if she could trust Hilary in the apartment during the day, then she could trust her there at night. So when she wanted to be with a man or felt it would be helpful to her career — a choice she made pragmatically, having never been foolish about sex — she went to his place instead. This eliminated married men from the realm of possibility, which was probably a good thing anyway. And she could control when the evening ended, just by leaving.

One night, she walked home along St. Mark’s Place through the throngs of kids who flocked to the city to buy T-shirts and records and festoon themselves with nose rings and tattoos. Two teenagers, blond Rastas, with a mangy, half-starved golden retriever on a leash, sat on a Mexican blanket on the sidewalk like they were having a picnic. Anne made the mistake of looking the thin, dirty girl in the eye. She was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, her fingernails painted green, and though her hair was greasy, her teeth were pearly and perfect; Anne guessed she hadn’t been gone from home for long. Somewhere people were looking for her, wondering why she’d left and where she’d gone.

“Hey,” the thin girl said, “can you give us some change? Please?”

Anne shook her head.

“Our dog’s really hungry.”

Anne kept walking as the girl kept talking, her voice rising to an angry squawk.

“What about a dollar?” she said. “What about fifty fucking cents?”

Anne didn’t look back. You couldn’t help everybody.

“I’m glad I don’t have a sister,” Hilary said.

She and Anne were sitting on the couch on a Thursday night, eating spaghetti and watching reality TV. Their latest routine, whenever Anne wasn’t rehearsing, was to have dinner together in the living room. Hilary herself had provided the television, which she claimed to have found on the street. After a month in the apartment, she was cleaner, calmer, and fatter. Anne sometimes thought of her as the cow , but not pejoratively; it had to do with the girl’s quietness, her large brown eyes, her shifting, bovine way of settling herself on the couch.

They were watching a show in which two sisters exchanged lives, each one now having to deal with the other’s annoying husband and children, thus learning to appreciate her own annoying husband and children.

“I have a brother,” Hilary said. “He’s twelve. He likes video games. I send him postcards sometimes.”

It might have been the longest Anne had ever heard her speak. “What’s his name?”

“Joshua.”

“Not Josh?”

Hilary shook her head. “We always use his full name. My parents are real religious. I’m from the country — well, not the country, exactly, just a small town. We live right in town, but there’s not much town there. Joshua wants to leave too. I write him postcards, like I said, but I don’t send them from here. I give them to people in the train station and ask them to mail them from wherever they’re going. That way nobody knows where I am.”

“You give them to strangers at the train station?”

“Older women, ones that are alone. They’re the nicest. I just say that I couldn’t find a mailbox, and would they mind dropping this postcard in the mail whenever they have time? They always say yes and don’t ask any questions.”

“You’re good at figuring people out,” Anne said.

The girl gave her a measured look. “Yeah, I guess I am.”

Through these casual Thursday-night disclosures, Anne learned that Hilary liked bananas and was allergic to coconut. That there wasn’t anything for her and her hometown friends to do at night except go to Walmart. That her father was dead and she’d grown up with her mother and stepfather, and that Joshua was actually her stepbrother. But beyond these random, basic facts, she didn’t share much. No sentence ever blossomed into anecdote, and she showed so little emotion, positive or negative, that Anne started to wonder if she was repressing some intense trauma. If she were a movie character, this would eventually burst loose in a flood of bad behavior. But life was longer than movies and a person never knew when the flood would finally come, or sometimes even how to recognize it when it did.

As they spent more time together, Anne began to feel not like a mother — because she thought of mothers as old and asexual — but like an older sister. It made her sad that Hilary was all alone in the world. She was alone too, but that was different; she was twenty-two, attractive, an actress in New York. A runaway who slept in doorways was vulnerable, pathetic. She brooded about Hilary’s weight, burgeoning day by day. Somewhere she had found a shapeless, navy-blue sweatsuit; she wore it constantly, and it made her look like an aging football player gone to fat. Anne didn’t buy her any more donuts, and stocked the fridge with fruit and vegetables. When she got home at night, she often made a salad and forced Hilary to eat it. Not that there was much forcing involved; she only had to say, “Here,” and the girl would eat whatever was put in front of her.

Sometimes, after dinner, Anne would suggest going for a walk, and they’d put on their coats and window-shop around the East Village for an hour or two. They’d stop at Café Mogador for a cup of tea, eavesdropping on people flirting or breaking up or arguing about the war, then resume their walk. None of this activity seemed to take any of the weight off, though.

Anne also started thinking about the girl’s future, wondering about school, or jobs, or friends. She didn’t put much trust in convention, but she did believe in self-actualization — a word she had picked up from other actors. For her it meant that you alone decided what your true self should be. But Hilary never mentioned wanting to do anything or be anything. She never read a book, listened to music, or even talked about dreams. She seemed to live in an eternal present, never worrying about what came next.

In the middle of March, Anne was cast in a great part in a new play. She wasn’t the leading lady but the catalyst, the unhinged and sexualized stranger whose energy makes all the normal people disintegrate. “You’re so perfect for this I want to die,” the director said. Everything he loved made him want to die. But when she read the script, she knew exactly how he felt. She wanted to die too, preferably onstage.