Alix Ohlin - Inside

“Don’t you have to go to work?” she said. She had a slight accent, not quite midwestern but broad, the consonants slurry and soft, like she was from the country.

“Not today.” Anne studied the girl’s slow, lumbering slide down onto the stool, noting how her face, creased from sleep, remained inert, as if frozen during a boring dream. The closest thing to an expression Anne had yet seen washed over the girl’s face at the sight of the donuts. She pulled the box toward her and started chewing on one, powdered sugar smudging the tip of her nose.

“What’s your name?”

Without a word, the girl picked up a second donut.

Anne stood up, snatched the donut out of her hand, and threw it, along with the rest of the box, into the garbage, then stood there with her arms folded, playing the disapproving mother.

The girl chewed, swallowed.

Get out, Anne thought.

“Hilary.”

If, at this point, the girl had said nothing more, Anne would have pinched her ear and marched her to the door, or called the police, anything to get her out of the apartment and her life.

But she said, “Are you an actress or model or something? You’re, like, gorgeous.”

Even while recognizing this as flattery, Anne found herself pleased. “I’m in the theater,” she said.

The girl grimaced. “I could never do that,” she said. “Too fat, too ugly.”

“You’re not,” Anne said mechanically. She had this conversation with other actresses almost every day, I’m so fat leading to No you’re not, you’re emaciated, I’m so ugly to No you’re not, you’re gorgeous . It was a call-and-response pattern, rhythmic and codified, like birdsong.

The girl accepted this insincerity and moved on. “Are you in a play right now?”

“In rehearsals. I play an Irish peasant woman during the potato famine. You know about the potato famine? I wind up prostituting myself in exchange for food for my family.”

“Prostituting yourself?” Hilary said, putting her elbows on the kitchen counter. Her large breasts rested on the counter like lumps of bread dough.

Anne nodded. In fact the prostitution was more implied than seen; she only had a few lines, but to make things interesting she had embroidered the character’s backstory. She’d spent so much time on this that she now felt the character had the tragic richness of a starring role. She was the center of the play, its crucial beating heart, but she was the only one who knew it. “Actually, if you wanted to be helpful, you could run some lines with me,” she said, feeling generous. “Then we can figure out the shelter situation.”

While she fished the script out of her bag, Hilary retrieved the donuts from the trash. She inhaled another one, drank some orange juice, then held out her hand for the pages. “Ready,” she said.

Hilary had a surprisingly clear voice and didn’t seem to tire of reading the lines over and over again. Once they started, Anne lowered herself into the character as if into a swimming pool: the water was cold at first, uncomfortable but bracing; then gradually, as the muscles warmed, the temperature turned out to be perfect, and the laps went by in strong, sure strokes, the body now fully engaged. She forgot everything else. It was only in these moments of concentration and release that she felt she could shed her own skin and slip free.

Suddenly it was noon.

“Shit,” Anne said, “I have to go. I’m supposed to meet the costume designer in fifteen minutes. Listen, Hilary.” It was the first time she’d called the girl by her name, but the effect was nil, the round face as inert as ever.

Then Hilary suddenly said, “The bathroom’s disgusting.”

“What?”

“I can clean it, while you’re at your meeting. The toilet, the bathtub, the floor. I can do all that.” Her voice was urgent and quick. She would neither plead nor act desperate, Anne could tell, but she would bargain.

In the days and months to come, she’d question her decision again and again. She couldn’t even remember what was going through her mind: it was as if she had blacked out and come to after the choice had been made. But the fact that she couldn’t explain it to herself was maybe as good a reason to do something as she’d ever had. Sometimes you needed to surprise yourself with randomness, to prove you have depths that even you can’t understand.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m not giving you a key, so you have to stay here. Eat whatever you want, not that you’ll find much food. I really don’t have any stuff for you to steal, but you still better not take anything. If I find anything gone when I come back, I’ll call the cops.”

“I don’t steal,” Hilary said.

“Sure you don’t. I’ll be back at five.”

When she left the apartment, she forgot about the girl completely — her name, her predicament, even her shit in the lobby. It wasn’t that she was naive or trusting; only that nothing was as real to her as herself.

After the meeting with the costume designer was rehearsal, and after that she had a drink with a guy who was putting together a production of Equus with a female cast, to be staged in a parking garage by the Manhattan Bridge. She walked home through Chinatown. On the steps of a church a man was selling shoes he’d collected from who knows where, lined up in obedient pairs as if they belonged to some invisible congregation. She picked out a pair of black pointy-toed heels with rhinestone clips. They smelled faintly of sweat and smoke or fire and the leather was creased, but they fit perfectly. As a child she had played dress-up in her mother’s clothes, dreaming of the day when she’d be a beautiful, grown-up lady, and the sensation of wearing someone else’s castoffs reminded her of this childhood pleasure. She handed the man a five, and he said, “God bless you, sweet thing.”

It was only as she pulled open the outer door that she remembered Hilary. She’d left a stranger alone in her apartment all day. She had to be insane.

But the apartment was quiet. Hilary was curled up on the couch beneath a blanket, her stocky body surprisingly compact, and seeing her asleep somehow changed everything. Anne had been planning to charge in and kick her out, but instead found herself slipping off her boots and setting her bag down quietly, so as not to disturb.

Then she thought, What the hell am I doing?

She turned on the lights and served herself a plate of noodles she’d picked up at Panda Kitchen, eating at the counter. When Hilary stirred, moving tectonically to an upright position, Anne wondered if she was on drugs.

“Could I have some?” Hilary said.

Anne didn’t eat much; she always had leftovers. “All right.”

Seeming to sense her mood, Hilary took some lo mein and carried her plate back to the couch. She was like an animal, observing unspoken, intuitive protocols of distance.

Anne, suddenly exhausted, put her plate in the sink and went into the bedroom, where the sheets had been changed. In the bathroom, the toothpaste blobs were gone from the sink, the bathtub was unstreaked, and everything smelled faintly of bleach. She crawled into bed and lay there listening for disruptive sounds — Hilary tossing or snoring or even breathing too loudly. Outside she heard traffic, horns, voices; but inside, nothing at all.

She didn’t kick her out the next day, or the day after that, and gradually they became strange, unlikely roommates. The shelter was never discussed. Hilary cleaned and sometimes cooked. She fixed the bedroom window that had gotten stuck, did the laundry, even swept the stairwells and changed the lightbulbs on the landings. Mrs. Bondarchuk, who didn’t realize where Hilary had come from, decided she was Anne’s cousin, and they didn’t correct her. The other old ladies in the building began saying hello to her and were friendlier to Anne as well, as if they had found her somehow alarming when she was on her own.