This is not a love story. But just one last bit about Randy before the real star of my story appears. It’s funny how love can leap from one person to another, like a flea. Until Rebecca showed up a few days later, it was the constant thought of Randy that kept me afloat. I still remember his address, since on weekends I would drive past his apartment one town over and sit low in the Dodge trying to see whether or not he was home, alone, awake. I wanted to know what he was doing, what he was thinking, whether I ever even crossed his mind. A few times, without planning, I’d bumped into him in X-ville just walking down Main Street. Each time, I’d raised my gloved hand, opened my mouth to speak, but he just sauntered past me. My chest nearly caved in on itself. One day he would see me, the real me, and he’d fall in love, I told myself. Until then, I pined and moped and did whatever I could to understand his gestures and habits and expressions, as though a fluency in the language of his body would give me a leg up when it came time to please him. He wouldn’t have to say a word. I thought I’d do anything to make him happy. But I wasn’t a fool. I knew Randy had been with girls sexually. Still, I could not imagine him in the act of copulation, which is what I called it in my head at the time. I couldn’t even begin to picture his bare nether regions, despite having seen a picture of some in one of my father’s pornographic magazines. I could imagine, though, in a postcoital moment, Randy laughing casually across a mussed bed at an invisible female figure. I held him in such high esteem. Just a glance in my direction had my pulse quick for hours. But that’s enough of him. Good-bye for now, Randy, good-bye.
Here’s what I looked like that Friday: brittle, fake alligator loafers with thick, worn heels and chipping gold buckles; white stockings which made my thin legs look wooden, doll-like; large yellow bouclé skirt that hung past my knees; gray wool jacket with sharp shoulders over a white cotton blouse; small brass-colored cross; hairdo several days old by now; no earrings; lipstick of a shade the store called Irreparable Red. I must have looked nineteen going on sixty-five in that foppish approximation of decency, that adult costume. Other girls were married by my age, had children, settled. To say I didn’t want all that would be too generous. All that simply wasn’t available to me. It was beyond me. By all appearances I was a homebody — naive, disinterested. If you’d have asked me, I would have told you I believed that a person had to be in love to make love. I’d have said I thought anyone who does, and isn’t, is a whore.
In hindsight, I don’t think I was so off-base in my desire for Randy. A union wouldn’t have been completely preposterous. He was employed, in good health, and it wasn’t completely unfeasible, I don’t think, that he might date me. I was a live young woman in his vicinity, after all. Despite my paranoia, there wasn’t anything outright offensive about the way I looked back then. I was unattractive in temperament most of all, but many men don’t seem to care about things like that. Of course Randy must have had other women to turn to. I wouldn’t have known what to do with him if I’d actually snagged him anyhow. By the time I turned thirty I’d learned how to relax, wink in the mirror, fall charmingly into the arms of countless lovers. My twenty-four-year-old self would die from shock at the quick death of my prudence. And once I left X-ville and filled out a bit, bought some clothes that fit me right, you might have seen me walking down Broadway or Fourteenth Street and thought I was a graduate student or maybe the assistant to some famous artist, on my way to pick up his check from the gallery. What I mean to say is that I was not fundamentally unattractive. I was just invisible.
That afternoon the mothers came and went. Sheaves of completed questionnaires got tossed in the trash along with glittering piles of caramel candy wrappers like heaps of dead insects. “Do you believe there is life on Mars? What qualities do you value most in your state officials?” Every day I picked up a dozen snot-filled tissues marked with lipstick like fat, dead, pink-tipped carnations. “Can you speak a foreign language? Do you prefer canned peas or canned carrots? Do you smoke?” A bell rang to signify that someone, one of the boys, had done something that would result in heavy punishment. James got up off his stool and mechanically walked down the corridor, wringing his hands. I squeezed the used tissues in my fists, added them to the papers and wrappers in the garbage.
“Take out that trash, Eileen,” said Mrs. Stephens, looking up at me from behind her armpit as she reached down to her desk drawer to retrieve a fresh box of candies.
“If there was life on Mars, it’s dead now,” one mother wrote.
“A man should be broad-shouldered and have a mustache.”
“A little French.”
“Peas.”
“Six packs a week. Sometimes more.”
• • •
Before I left Moorehead that Friday, Mrs. Stephens asked me to decorate the Christmas tree which the janitor had dragged into the prison waiting room, empty now that visiting hours were over. I remember it was a voluptuous pine and the needles were thick and waxy and its sap filled the air with a stunning tang. There was a storage closet where all the seasonal decorations were kept — Easter cutouts of bunnies and golden eggs, Independence Day flags, Labor and Memorial Day banners, Thanksgiving turkeys and pumpkins. One Halloween we hung garlands of garlic over the office doorway, and in an assembly after lunch the warden gave a ghoulish recitation of the Lord’s abominations in Deuteronomy. It was ridiculous.
The Christmas tree ornaments were just as I’d left them the year before, haphazardly packed back into their sagging cardboard box. The metal balls encrusted with glitter and gold were chipping and fading, each year fewer of them to stuff back into the nests of old newspaper, but they were charming and filled me with longing. I had hard feelings around the holidays, the one time of year I couldn’t help but fall prey to the canned self-pity Christmas prescribes. I’d mourn the lack of love and warmth in my life, wish upon stars for angels to come and pluck me from my misery and plunk me down into a whole new life, like in the movies. I was a sucker for the spirit of Christmas, as it was called. Growing up, I learned I’d be praised and rewarded for my suffering, for my strong efforts to be good, but every year God smote me. No presents, no miracles, no holy night. I pitied myself for that, too. I tried to keep a straight face as I unpacked the decorations. There were garlands of holly made of shiny plastic that smelled like strong antiseptic chemicals, which I liked. And at the bottom of the box there were tinsel and old paper snowflakes the boys had snipped from white construction paper many Christmases ago, some as old as twenty years, probably. When I unfolded them, they were disturbed and angry geometries, little acts of violence, but the names written in the corners were in controlled, regular penmanship in pale silver pencil. I remember names like Cheyney Morris, age 17. Roger Jones, 14. I was supposed to stick them on the painted brick wall in the waiting area, but I’d used up all my Scotch tape fixing the hem of my coat when the stitching had unraveled the week before, so I stuffed the snowflakes deep between the branches of the tree. They looked like snow there. I liked methodical work like hanging ornaments and so I lost myself in the task quite easily. That was good. I felt wistful. I saved a portion of the decorations for the top third of the tree, which was too high for me to reach without extending my arms above my head. If I did that, anyone would be able to see the darkened stains of sweat beneath my arms. Heaven forbid.