Лидия Юкнавич - Verge - Stories

By the time you get to the young black man in the first window, huge waves of relief send a shiver up your back. You’ve made it, goddammit, and an angel has appeared to take your money. There is no room for the nasty white man begging money to come around to your driver’s-side window, he could never fit between the ledge of the window with the guardian angel and the safety of your car, your finger on the button to raise your window should danger appear. The young man takes your money and returns your change, asks you what kind of sauce you want, gives it to you in a beautiful little white bag with golden arches on it, why, it’s heaven, it’s just like being in heaven, the delight is filling your whole body now, earlier you thought you had to pee and the line of cars seemed unbearable, but now, now you are making an exchange that is simple and good and profound in its truth. The young man smiles and waves as you head slowly to the second window, his salary doesn’t even enter your mind, you are free, you are on the way to the second window.

Surely he is at one of the cars behind you. Surely things will get held up there, someone will refuse to open their window and he will knock on it, or he will appear inside the frame of the front windshield and the driver will avert her gaze, he will give up and move on, or back, or away. You risk a quick look in your rearview—nothing nothing nothing, like pennies from heaven.

Your car glides almost magically to the second window, its opening apparent, hands visible, a bag of food bulging and white and smelling of good oil—all vegetable oil—and fried things. Your family is waiting at home. Your car is filled with gas. Your money has been paid.

A pimply-faced girl with headgear and braces hands you your bag, and you see capitalism and youth emerging from the window, you see her first summer job, her first lessons at responsibility and a savings account and taking care of herself, you see her on her way to college, yes, that’s it, the summer before college, the lessons she is learning, what a good student she will make, how she will excel in school, how she will learn well, how she will enter the workforce with a good head on her shoulders. And then there is a rapping at your window on the passenger side, and strange how you forgot, isn’t it? And your head swivels over out of dumb instinct, and there he is, his bad teeth and leathery skin and marble-blurred eyes filling the window, like a close-up, magnified, terrifying. His horrible mouth is opening and closing, he is saying something to you, he is talking to you, his muffled voice breaking through the glass shelter, now he is yelling, you are clutching your bag for dear life, you are putting your car in drive, his fingers at the ledge of your world, your own body like a snake’s: all spine and nerve.

Then a new image: From the front window, you see a man in uniform, my God, an older man with a McDonald’s uniform complete with cap and manager’s badge is running toward your car, he is waving his arms, he is shouting. With one hand you are clutching your steering wheel as in a near-miss accident, and with the other hand you are clutching your white bag of food, heavy and full, and your eyes are like a frozen deer’s, and your body is taut, and your nipples are hard as little stones. Your mouth is dry, and you are as alert as you are capable of being. The manager yells at the shitty little begging white man, You go now! You go now! You outta here now! Shithead! Motherfucking! You go! No slaving here! His slip of the tongue doesn’t even faze you. You are with him. United. You are grateful. There is no dividing you. The two of you are in it together, you are saving each other, you are making the world a better place, you are the American way embodied, you are at each other’s back, you are two hundred billion served.

This bed smells of my skin. If I roll from my back to my belly, sweat cools near my spine. If I close my eyes, I am like an animal up here in the heat and wood, baking in the daylight, my eyelids heavy, my thoughts slow and thudding. I am waiting for dark, for the release, for breathing to animate me. This room and everything in it brings me closer to myself: nocturnal.

From the frame of my attic window, I have imagined the inside-out of this town. Its heat rising from dust and scrub, its mindless longing for rain, its heart beating with dumb insistence. Outside my room the world has expanded and contracted like the tight little fist of a child. Years have gone by. I used to wonder who would want to live here, like this, some dried-out town at the edge of the story line, the nightly news, never quite making it into the picture, its people crowding the geography somehow without evolution or design. There is a black-and-red sign over the door of the Texaco. It reads TEXAS, USA. No city. No need. That’s the whole deal, stuck up there on a piece of metal the size of a license plate. Like thought stopped for gas and died at the pump.

I remember the day I moved from my room downstairs up to the attic. It had been my brother’s. He’d gone to college, I’d hit puberty, the two motions crackling away from each other like electrical currents. The white canopy bed of a girl died that day, for I never went back. The day I moved into my brother’s attic room, I felt the wooden walls close in around me, as if a second body were there to hold me. The wood grain looked to me like dark, warm skin, comforting me.

Underneath the bed I found artifacts from my brother’s life. Empty bottles and broken glass, trash, foil, used rubbers and tissues, tiny vials and a stretch of surgical tubing. It was a year before I found any needles, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. He’d shown me his world when I was around ten, knowing I would love it as I loved every moment he let me be in his attic, adoring him, adoring the dark of the room, the broken rules, the thick unbearable silence, the smells I hadn’t names for, the dizzy swell of skin making sweat. But I did find everything. A loose board in the wall, a stash I only barely comprehended at the time. Wasn’t I meant to find it, to find it all? Wasn’t I meant to identify the smell as sex and move my body toward delivering itself? Wasn’t I meant to prove my worth, to carry on the weight of that room?

On my fourteenth birthday, I got a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from my brother. He was home from college for the summer. He gave it to me in secret, after dark, and we sat up in the attic window that connected our lives and drank it until I was bleary and swollen and unable to focus. At some point after midnight, we became overheated and half clothed. The heat works on you like that. You shed layers like the skin of a snake until the body can bear itself. My brother brought the whiskey to his face, took it, held it in his mouth like that with his eyes closed.

“Well,” he said, “it’s almost here, huh?”

“You mean that?” I asked, pointing out the window toward the future, toward the place out in the dark where they were building. It was a prison, or the idea of one, a place of curiosity and danger emerging in the town that was smothering us.

“Yeah, guess that will change things around here.”

“It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me in my sorry-ass little life.”

He looked at me, I think he toasted me, and he said, “You’ll get out soon enough. You’ll see. When you get out, it’s a whole new world, a new life.”

“What if I don’t get out?”

He laughed and laughed. “You? You were out the day you were born. You’ll probably end up at Harvard or some fancy shit. You’ve got brains.”