In the middle of March, Anne was cast in a great part in a new play. She wasn’t the leading lady but the catalyst, the unhinged and sexualized stranger whose energy makes all the normal people disintegrate. “You’re so perfect for this I want to die,” the director said. Everything he loved made him want to die. But when she read the script, she knew exactly how he felt. She wanted to die too, preferably onstage.
It was a long play, with commensurately long rehearsals in Long Island City that started almost immediately. So Anne was suddenly home a lot less. When she returned late at night, she sometimes saw no more of Hilary than her blanketed, sleeping form on the couch.
Another thing: there was a man, a member of the crew and a friend of the director’s, a soft-spoken, scruffy carpenter. He was earnest and cute, with dark eyes and a surprisingly white, toothy smile. She often went home with him after rehearsals, and when she came back to her apartment after a day or two away it almost felt like she was entering a stranger’s home, where she was now the guest.
One weekend, the director got food poisoning and canceled the rehearsals. Anne had fallen so in love with her character, and the extra dimension it gave her own personality, that she felt almost jilted. Grumpily, she decided to spend the empty days catching up on the few basic tasks of her streamlined life: laundry, bills, nails. On Saturday morning Hilary wasn’t at home, and Anne wondered if she had followed her advice and found some kind of job. Anne came and went throughout the day, and when the girl still hadn’t reappeared she was unaccountably freaked out. She’d held a certain image of the apartment in her mind all those days and nights when she’d been gone, with Hilary there and the apartment somehow tended, waiting for her to come back. Realizing now that she had no idea of Hilary’s movements or whereabouts made her feel strangely unmoored.
Once her laundry was finished, she went to the bodega for milk. She was pulling a carton out of the fridge when she heard a familiar voice say, “I’m dying for some ice cream.”
Hilary was standing on the other side of the store, her blond braids snaking down her shoulder blades. There was a crowded aisle between them, and the girl had no idea she was there. Anne couldn’t see the guy she was talking to — a stack of cereal and toilet paper was blocking her view — but she heard him say, “You always want ice cream. You’re, like, obsessed with ice cream.”
“I’m not obsessed.”
“Are too.”
“Am not. Which do you want? I want chocolate chunk, cookie dough, or cherry cheesecake.”
“Three flavors, but you’re not obsessed?”
“Shut up!”
Hilary’s tone was gauzy and flirty, lithe with laughter. It sounded like a voice that belonged to a girl who moved quickly, showed some skin, fell in love. Not like the Hilary Anne knew at all.
She took a step closer, peering through the dry goods while staying hidden. The guy looked even younger than Hilary and was very thin, with pocked skin that contrasted sharply with his full, dark lips. His hair was sculpted into a miniature Mohawk, and his eyebrow and nose were pierced. His red hoodie was slipping off his slouched shoulders, and his jeans were sliding off his hips. There was barely enough of him to hang clothes on. She could crush him, Anne thought. He didn’t look like much, but neither did Hilary, in her shapeless blue sweatsuit. In this, they were a matched pair.
They finally settled on chocolate, and Anne followed them, leaving her own purchase behind, back to the apartment. She waited five minutes, then went inside.
Hilary glanced up, her expression blinkered, unrepentant. “This is Alan,” she said.
“Hey,” he said.
Anne said nothing, just sat down on the couch and watched them. She hoped this would make them so uncomfortable that the guy would leave, but it didn’t seem to. They stood at the counter eating ice cream and teasing each other, and Anne’s presence didn’t even seem to have registered. Their dialogue was like the worst play she’d ever seen.
“You’re a messy eater.”
“I am not.”
“You have chocolate on your chin.”
“So do you.”
“Where?”
“Right there.”
And so on and so on. She was the audience, which she hated being. After a while she went into the bedroom and closed the door, her emotions feeding on themselves: she was upset because she was mad, and that made her even angrier. She took deep breaths and counted to a hundred, then left the apartment without a word and spent two hours at yoga. They were gone when she got back, their bowls washed and drying by the sink.
Even by herself, her apartment felt different, the air contaminated by someone else’s sexual energies, someone else’s flirt. What was happening?
She slept uneasily that night, waiting for Hilary to come back. Somehow she missed her reentry, but when she woke up at three in the morning, they were both in the living room — Hilary on the couch, Alan on the floor. He was sleeping on a pad made of blankets they must have scavenged, and his pillow was a bundled square of clothes.
She stood in the doorway watching them. The shadows were tinted blue from a neon sign across the street. Hilary turned over on the couch, her movements slow, labored, her body huge. She opened her eyes and looked right at Anne with no expression at all. Vacancy didn’t begin to describe it. Standing there in her tank top and pajama pants, the hair rising on her arms, Anne felt sticklike, insubstantial, and for the first time she could remember she wished she were bigger, stronger, heavier. Now she felt like the one who could be crushed. Without saying anything, Hilary closed her eyes and seemed to fall back asleep.
What would you say to the police? There’s someone in my apartment — no, it wasn’t a break-in, more of a slow slide-in. Or, I’m under attack by a fat teenage girl and her pimple-faced boyfriend? What was the crime here, exactly? She stewed over these questions in the night, cooked them to an angry boil. She decided that in the morning she’d tell Hilary the boy had to go, or else she’d call the police. A runaway is a runaway. Maybe Hilary’s face was on a milk carton somewhere. Maybe her parents would be thankful.
In the morning, in fact, the boy was gone. Anne made coffee and waited for Hilary to wake up, wondering what she was going to say. They had no language, the two of them, for the kind of conversation she needed to have. They’d never exchanged any confidences, romantic or otherwise, and it was too late now to establish that kind of base. She couldn’t ask Hilary who the boy was, because she’d never asked who Hilary was.
When Hilary finally woke up and saw Anne watching her, she didn’t look startled. Even in her sleep she seemed to have been preparing for the confrontation. Her languid cow’s eyes were ready. “Listen,” she said, “thanks for letting us stay.”
“Us?” Anne said.
“Me and Alan. We were desperate before. You’re really saving our asses.”
“I didn’t realize I was saving both your asses.”
“Yeah, well, for a while Alan was up in Syracuse working construction. But now he’s back.”
For the life of her, Anne couldn’t picture that scrawny punk lifting a hammer or a two-by-four. Surely he’d snag the tools on his eyebrow rings. As these thoughts piled up, she realized she had become just like her mother, and she could also blame Hilary for putting her on the wrong side of a generational divide. “You can’t both stay here,” she said.
Hilary nodded as if she’d been expecting this. “Okay, I figured. But can we stay until the baby comes?”