Leopoldine Core - When Watched - Stories

A pair of wealthy-looking women walked by. They had such similar plastic surgery that they looked like sisters. It made Joan laugh. Maybe I’m crazy, she thought with the breeze in her hair. But the world is deeply insane. Suddenly she felt happier than she had in weeks. Joan looked up at the blue sky and thought it might be even more beautiful than her daughter.

She passed a man on a stool with his easel before him. He was painting a cheesy panoramic of some buildings, even though there was a drooling junkie behind him. Why don’t you paint that? Joan wondered. A man bumped into her and she realized, as she had so many times, that she was invisible. It made her want to do something obscene like take her top off. But no, that would disgust people. She pictured herself getting arrested with her breasts out and felt incredibly sad. There’s no reward for being an older female, she thought. Because no one wants to look at your flesh.

She didn’t feel older, that was the confusing part. She felt seventeen, just as hungry. Maybe she always would. Maybe the energy that was sizzling and repressed in high school would keep unfurling all her life.

A cop on a horse clomped slowly by and Joan wiped the sweat from her upper lip. She wondered what it was like to be seized and made to carry people your whole life, then killed when you were old. She wondered if there were any wild horses left in the world. Joan felt herself slowing as she calculated the possible number of them — eighteen? Her feet hurt. She wiped her lip again, then tore her eyes from the doomed horse and hailed a cab.

• • •

At home it was quiet. The cats rubbed themselves against the backs of her legs, then walked about the kitchen meowing. “Calm down you lunatics,” Joan said. She drank a glass of water. Then another.

Franny and Zooey lay on the table, facedown beside an open can of soda. Joan snatched the book up with a small flourish of anger. Opening it, the smell of aged paper jumped up into the air.

Inside was a loose photograph of herself as a teen, smiling in a pale pink romper, a yellow telephone beaming before her. Joan flipped the photograph over and read 1971 in blue ink. Abruptly she stuck the photo back in the book and walked with it to Cindy’s door.

There was a round sticker by the doorknob. Maybe it had been there before but she couldn’t be sure. It pictured a humanish cartoon rabbit giving the middle finger. Next to it there was a sticker that read WISH YOU WERE WEIRD in neon green letters. That one was old. Joan froze for a second, then knocked.

“Yeah?”

“Can I come in?”

“Do I really have a choice?”

“No.” Joan opened the door.

“Why even ask if I don’t have a choice?”

“Because I respect you.”

Cindy let out a dismissive puff of air, making her doubt clear. She was lying on the bed, cell phone in hand.

“You left this in the kitchen,” Joan said.

“On purpose,” Cindy said.

“I gave it to you,” Joan said. She seated herself on the bed and set the book down.

Cindy stared, her face a dark shield.

“I found this picture inside,” Joan said and for a moment Cindy looked caught.

“It’s me in 1971,” Joan reported. She placed the photograph on the bed before her daughter, who hesitated, then picked it up.

“I saw it,” Cindy admitted. Then, “I like how you looked. Everything was so pretty in the seventies.”

Joan almost stopped breathing; she didn’t want to break the delicate twig that suddenly held them together. “It was pretty,” she said finally. “But if you were depressed it was really intense.”

Cindy looked genuinely curious. “How?”

“Just gauzy and endless,” Joan said. “It made me want to scream.”

Cindy understood that. She laughed. “I like the yellow phone though.”

“All girls wanted a princess phone in their bedroom,” Joan said. “Mostly they were white and pink and lavender.” She stared into space. “Actually, I don’t know if they were ever lavender. But that would have been the perfect color.”

Cindy had stopped looking at the photograph and Joan knew their time was almost up. She didn’t want to sit and watch the sweetness recede — it was too excruciating. So with a small smile she stood and let herself out.

• • •

Later Dennis and Joan lay in bed reading. The cats sat at the window, staring out at something on the sill, their tails making question marks.

“Cindy saw a picture of me from 1971 today.”

“Oh yeah?”

“She liked it.” Joan rested her hands on her open book. “And the funny thing is that I remember how much I liked looking at pictures of my mom when she was younger.”

“Because you didn’t know her.”

“That’s exactly why.” Joan lay there blinking.

“Look at them,” Dennis said, pointing at Carrot and Sneaker. “I love a cat looking out a window.” He paused. “It makes the window more beautiful.”

“It’s sort of monstrous though,” Joan said. “That we don’t allow them to partake in their own nature. Everything they want is out there,” she said, gesturing toward the window. “But everything they have is in here.”

They were quiet, watching the cats.

“The only justification is that we’re keeping them alive,” she added. “It’s like we’re God.”

Dennis laughed. “But maybe it’s not so bad,” he said. “They never get what they think they want, so looking out the window is probably like watching TV.”

“What a TV,” Joan said. She thought of all the trapped creatures on earth, all of them watching the free world and waiting to join it. If there was no window to look through, there was the shimmering thought of one. There was a mind. They were all waiting because something better was out there for them on the other side. There had to be.

Miranda found a seat toward the back of the room. A man left the coffee station and walked toward her, staring a moment. He had a very dirty face. Homeless, she thought and recoiled. Then he sat in the chair directly to her right.

The meeting began and her eyes swam nervously around the room, hunting for another seat. She spotted one but it was far away and she didn’t want to draw attention to herself. She didn’t want people to think What a coward or What a stuck-up bitch . So she remained in her seat, smelling the man.

She found it difficult to focus on the woman talking at the front of the room, hearing only stray details. She fidgeted, her eyes batting around. She felt so aware of how she might look in the chair: her scrawny body and big breasts, her stringy black hair. Everyone else seemed to be listening. But that can’t possibly be true, she thought.

The woman said she often considered shooting herself in the head. This grabbed Miranda’s attention. “I keep seeing my brains splattered all over the wall,” the woman said and, audibly, the whole room’s breathing changed. “I’m not drinking. I haven’t drank in sixteen years. But the world still scares me.” The woman grimaced, holding back tears. Then she started talking about the seventh step and Miranda’s focus wavered. She could only focus when people detailed their sorrows. Otherwise AA had the empty feeling of a cult.

She glanced sideward at the homeless man, his filthy profile. He was older than her, with gunmetal gray hair and the deep, tanned wrinkles of a farmer. Her gaze lingered over the mystery of his features, each one shaded with dirt. Then he turned and grinned at her. It was startling. He had thin, darkly arched brows and very blue eyes.

Miranda smiled quickly and turned away, blushing profusely. She had the urge to bolt as she always did when any man showed even the slightest interest in her. But she only stirred in her seat, fumbling with her fingers in her lap.