Holly ended up working for Mitchell Fine Homes and Estates and taking community college classes at night. Most of them were computer science courses, although she snuck in an English class or two. All was going pretty well—she was often unhappy, but had come to accept that, like a birthmark or a turned-in foot—until Frank Mitchell, Jr., the boss’s son, began to bother her.
“Bother my fanny!” Holly tells the empty kitchen. “He hounded me! For sex!”
When she told her mother some of what was going on at the office, Charlotte advised her to laugh it off. Men were men, she said, went through life following their peckers, and they never changed. Coping with them wasn’t pleasant, but it was part of life, you had to take the bitter with the sweet, what could not be cured must be endured, so on and so on.
Dad’s not that way, Holly had said, to which her mother waved one hand in an airy gesture of dismissal that said of course he’s not and he wouldn’t dare and I’d like to see him try it. A lot to convey in a simple hand gesture, but Charlotte had managed.
What Holly didn’t tell her was that she had almost given in, had almost given the bulgy-eyed trout-faced son of a so-and-so what he wanted. Nobody likes you here, Junior Mitchell said. You’re standoffish and you do substandard work. Without me you’d be out on your ass. So how about a little payback, huh? I think once you try it, you’ll like it.
They went into his office, and Junior started to unbutton her blouse. The first button… the second… the third… and then she slapped him, a real roundhouse, putting everything she had into it, knocking his glasses off and making his lip bleed. He called her a useless bitch and said he could get her arrested for assault. Gathering courage she hadn’t known she possessed, speaking in a coldly certain voice that sounded nothing like her usual one (which was so quiet that people often had to ask her to repeat herself), she told him that if he tried that, when the police came she’d tell them he tried to rape her. And something in his face—a kind of instinctive grimace—made her think that the police might believe her side of the story, because Frank Jr. had been in trouble before. Trouble of this sort. In any case, that was the end of it. For him, at least. Not for Holly, who came in early one day a week later, trashed his office, then curled up in her shitty little cubicle with her head on her desk. She would have crawled under the desk, but there wasn’t room.
A month in a “treatment center” followed (her parents had found money enough for that), then three years of counseling. The counseling ended when her father died, but she continued to take various medications which left her functional but seeing the world as if through a cellophane wrapper.
What cannot be cured must be endured: the gospel according to Charlotte Gibney.
Holly puts out her cigarette under the tap, rinses the teacup, sets it in the drainer, and goes upstairs. The first door on the right is the guest room. Except not really. The wallpaper’s wrong, for one thing, but it’s still creepily like the room she lived in as a teenager in Cincinnati. Charlotte perhaps believed her mentally and emotionally unstable daughter would come to realize she wasn’t meant to live among people who didn’t understand her problems. As Holly steps inside she thinks again, Museum exhibit. There should be a sign saying HABITAT OF A SAD GIRL, TRISTIS PUELLA.
That her mother loved her Holly still has no doubt. But love isn’t always support. Sometimes love is taking the supports away.
Over the bed is a poster of Madonna. Prince is on one wall, Ralph Macchio as the Karate Kid on another. If she looked on the shelves below her tidy little sound system (Ludio Ludius, the little sign would say), she’d find Bruce Springsteen, Van Halen, Wham!, Tina Turner, and of course the Purple One. All on cassettes. The tartan coverlet, which she always hated, is on the bed. Once there was a girl who lived among these things, and looked out the window at Bond Street, and played her music, and wrote her poems on a blue portable Olivetti typewriter. What followed the typewriter was a Commodore PC with a tiny screen.
Holly looks down and sees she is holding those red tags with SAVE printed on them. She can’t even remember picking them up.
“I’m glad I came here,” she says. “It’s wonderful to be home.”
She goes to the Star Wars wastebasket (Bella Siderea, the little sign would say—how the old Latin comes back) and drops the tags into it. Then she sits down on the bed with her hands clasped between her thighs. So many memories here. The question is simple: face or forget?
Face, of course, and not because she’s a different person now, a better person, a courageous person who has faced horrors most people wouldn’t believe. Face because there is no other choice.
After her breakdown, after the so-called “treatment center,” Holly answered an ad from a small publisher who wanted to hire an indexer for a series of three doorstop-sized books about local history written by a Xavier University prof. She was nervous when the interview began—scared stiff, more like it—but the editor, Jim Haggerty, was so obviously at sea when it came to indexing that Holly was able to tell him how she’d proceed without stuttering and getting all tangled up in her own words, as she had so often in her high school classes. She said she would first create a concordance, then make a computer file, then categorize and alphabetize. After that the work would go back to the author, who would vet, edit, and return it to her for any final changes.
“I’m afraid we don’t have a computer just yet,” Haggerty said, “only a few IBM Selectrics. Although I suppose we’ll have to get one—wave of the future, and all that.”
“I have one,” Holly said. She sat forward, so excited by the possibilities that she forgot this was a job interview, forgot Frank Jr., forgot about going through four years of high school known as Jibba-Jibba.
“And you’d use it for indexing?” Haggerty looked bemused.
“Yes. Take the word Erie, for instance. That’s a category, but it can refer to the lake, the county, or to the Erie Native American tribe. Which would have to be cross-referenced with Cat Nation, of course, and Iroquois. Even more! I’d have to go over the material again to get a handle on that, but you see the way it works, right? Or wait, take Plymouth, that’s a really interesting one—”
Haggerty stopped her there and told her she could have the job on spec. He knew an index-nerd when he saw one, Holly thinks as she sits on the bed.
That first job, an earn-while-you-learn situation if ever there was one, led to more indexing jobs. She moved out of the house on Bond Street. She bought her first car. She upgraded her computer and took more classes. She also took her pills. When she was working, she felt bright and aware. When she wasn’t, that sense of living in a cellophane bag returned. She went on a few dates, but they were clumsy, awkward affairs. The obligatory kiss goodnight too often made her think of Frank Jr.
When the indexing work ran thin (the publisher of the doorstop history books went broke), Holly worked for the local hospitals, which were loosely affiliated, as a medical transcriptionist. To this she added claims filing for Cincinnati District Court. There were the obligatory visits home, more of them after the death of her father. She listened to her mother complain about everything from her finances to the neighbors to the Democrats who were ruining everything. Sometimes on these visits Holly thought of a line from one of the Godfather movies: Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. At Christmas, she and her mother and Uncle Henry sat on the couch and watched It’s a Wonderful Life. Holly wore her Santa hat.