He shook the gun at me, which shook me out of my beastly state, or partly. I stared at the ceiling, desperately trying to capture an idea of what acting hip looked like. I had a firmer grasp of “cool” and hoped the two were interchangeable. I took a deep breath and plunged into what I thought might be hip behavior: I began by combing my fingers through my hair, which I did not manage very well, for my hair was wet and tangled, and my fingers got stuck.
Damon took off his wet shirt and dropped it on the floor. It was the first time I saw him genuinely topless. He was predictably well built.
I kept acting hip as he escorted me back to my cell.
We changed into dry clothes, and he made me continue to act hip during stretching, jumping on the trampoline, and dinner. Then we laid down on my bed and watched Now Voyager, starring Bette Davis, and I thought I was acting hip, but he said, “You’re not sitting in a hip position. It’s a nerdy position. Sit in a hip position.”
I shifted my legs on the bed. I bent one, and crossed my fingers on my stomach. He seemed soothed. I so wished I had a cigarette or chocolate so I could be soothed too.
Halfway through the movie he said, “Now I want you to do slim-hipped and statuesque.”
He was not sane, it was as simple as that. I didn’t move.
After a minute, he said, “Aren’t you going to change your position? You can’t stay in the same position. That’s the hip position. You can’t stay in the hip position if you’re going to do slim-hipped and statuesque.”
“Well maybe I’m a slim-hipped, hip, and statuesque person.”
“I still think you should change your position.”
I sat up a little straighter in bed and pressed my hands against my hips, as if squeezing them closer together.
“What are you doing with your hands?” he asked.
“Making my hips slimmer.”
“You call that good acting? I’m not asking you to be slim-hipped, at least not right now; I’m asking you to act slim-hipped. And statuesque.”
I thought about very skinny people, and remembered noticing the way they often sat: they sat not merely crossed-legged (with one leg simply hanging over the other), but with their leg wrapped around the other, many times, like a sort of vine.
So I tried to do that, and it was not very comfortable, but it earned me some silence, which I assumed meant it was acceptable.
After the movie, he left me for the night, depositing on my bed a new scene I had to learn by morning.
I read it and was appalled and learned it.
I chose not to turn on the TV today. I wasn’t in the mood to see what I was missing out on; the attention I was not getting; the opportunities I was not there to grab.
I went to bed. I was absolutely exhausted, having barely slept for two days. I was intending to have a good night’s sleep to be in good shape to escape if I had an opportunity.
I did fall into a deep sleep, but woke up in the middle of the night feeling extremely confused and disoriented, because I was all wet and getting wetter by the second. I was being rained on by a large cloud that had drifted into my cage.
My blanket, my pillow, the mattress, and the carpet were wet. I was cold. I shouted for Damon, and sloshed over to the bars of my cell to scream some more, but I was distracted by the sight of five sparkling, dark red stones scattered at my feet. Having worked in a jewelry store, I knew before picking them up that they were garnets. Next to them was a small white card.
Slowly and with agony, I lowered myself and picked up the stones and the card, which said:
Dear Anna Graham,
Don’t think I’m not aware that this is what you think of me.
And don’t think I’m not aware that you think it’s putting it mildly.
Follow your name to understand me.
(7-letter word)
Yours,
Damon
The cloud growled at me like a dog. As if responding to his growl, the other clouds in the house started thundering, or rumbling too.
I shook my towel at it, to create a breeze, to make it leave, but it was big and would require a stronger breeze to budge it.
Or the opposite, I thought, suddenly struck with an idea. All monsters had their weakness, their particular requirement for being killed: vampires needed a stake through the heart or exposure to the sun; the living dead had to be burned, I think, or decapitated; and clouds needed to be dealt with, with … a particular household appliance I happened to have in my cell.
I took the vacuum cleaner out of the closet, plugged it in, turned it on, and lifted it in the air, aiming its mouth at the cloud.
The vacuum let me down once again. Its suction power was no more effective than its dust in fighting my enemies. The cloud was not being sucked in, and kept raining on my bed. I threw the vacuum aside.
I needed my escape rest. I looked for a dry patch of carpet on which to sleep, and found one under the monitors. I got some towels to use as blankets. I also took my poor nude pen and a pad, to try to solve the anagram Damon had left me, in case it came in handy to know what he thought I thought of him.
It took me fifteen minutes to figure out that the anagram for garnets was strange. I would have been better off getting my sleep.
Which is what I then tried to do, but failed. I was not used to sleeping on the floor, pillowless. I needed my bed, and since the cloud seemed to have finished relieving itself on it, I took down the plastic shower curtain, spread it over my wet mattress, and laid on it. Eventually, I wrapped myself completely in the shower curtain when the cloud started drizzling on me again.
Listening to the sound of the raindrops on the plastic, and hoping I wouldn’t die of suffocation breathing that hot, humid, scarcely oxygenated air, I finally managed to fall asleep inside the shower curtain.
Chapter Ten
When I told him I had been rained on during the night, Damon was horrified and apologized profusely, saying he should have checked the weather forecast in the living room before going to bed. Despite his remorse, he forced me to keep doing “slim-hipped and statuesque” all through breakfast and through the ensuing bicycling session. Then he told me to switch to nerdy without even giving me a short break during which I could insult him. I had to do nerdy through swimming, jumping on the trampoline, calisthenics, and half of lunch, when he said I could stop, and I was able to insult him to my heart’s content while, using spoons, we ate small portions of delicious healthy pasta cut in short strands. And then he interrupted me in the middle of a new insult, and said gently, “You look a little gloomy.”
I was stunned by this absurd understatement. I opened my mouth to utter some stinging retort, but noticed the orange plastic barrel of his gun pointed at me, and I replied instead, “Yes, I’m depressed about our daughter, Anna. It upsets me that she’s such a failure.”
“I know, I feel the same way,” he said, “but we should try not to think about it.”
I recited stoically: “Moderate failure would be one thing. But such monumental failure. It’s heart-wrenching. She hasn’t managed to get one acting job, not one penny earned from acting, just classes and Xeroxing and piercing. I don’t understand what’s wrong with her. I dread it when my friends ask me what Anna is up to. I actually feel embarrassed for having nothing of interest to relate. And I hate myself for feeling ashamed. And I hate myself for even admitting this now.”
“You’re just being honest. I feel the same way. John O’Connor was telling me the other day about the various accomplishments of the sons and daughters of our unit owners, and then he asked what our children were up to. I told him about our son’s graduation and his great job, and I hoped he would leave it at that, not ask about Anna, but he did. In fact, he said, ‘And that daughter of yours? That promising one? That ambitious one?’ It was really uncomfortable. I felt like a fool.”