Faithless: Tales of Transgression Read online

  Now and then I thought, not altogether seriously, about bleaching my hair platinum blond, wearing it in some chic sexy style. One of my vivid childhood memories (there aren’t many) was seeing two teenage boys observing a girl in high heels walking ahead of them on a sidewalk, a girl with a glossy blond pageboy, a good figure, and when they caught up with her to get a better look she turned to them and she was plain, homely—she wore glasses, she was horse-faced. One boy groaned rudely, the other laughed. They poked each other in the ribs the way boys do. The girl turned away, pretending not to know what all this meant. I hadn’t been that girl but I’d seen, and I’d heard. Already, not ten years old, I knew my fate.

  One advantage of ugly: you don’t require anyone to see you the way a good-looking person does, to be real. The better-looking you are, the more dependent upon being seen and admired. The uglier, the more independent.

  Another advantage of ugly: you don’t waste time trying to look your best, you will never look your best.

  What I remember of my face is a low forehead, a long nose with a bulblike tip, dark shiny eyes set too close together. Those dark thick eyebrows like an orangutan’s. A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope? My skin was darkish-olive like something smeared by an eraser. My pores were oily, even before puberty. In some eyes I looked “foreign.” I’d looked “foreign” as far back as grade school, when the teasing began. I came to like the feeling—“foreign.” Like “foreign substance”—“foreign object”—in food, in an eye, on a radar screen. Though no one on either side of my family has been “foreign” for generations. All proud to be “one hundred percent American” though none of us had a clue what “American” meant.

  9

  BUSINESS WAS SLOW at the Sandy Hook Inn, now the weather had turned. Tourists avoided the northern New Jersey seashore where always there was a wet, whining wind and the brightest sun could be eclipsed within minutes by glowering thunderheads. Each morning before dawn the wind woke me, rattling my single window like a cruel prank. My legs, feet, and spine ached profoundly from the previous day’s waitressing, yet I was excited by the prospect of enduring another day at the Sandy Hook Diner. I’ve come to the right place by instinct. Here is the edge.

  The Sandy Hook Diner, its exterior built to resemble a railroad car. Glinting like cheap tin.

  The Sandy Hook Diner, in the early morning: a row of ten frayed black vinyl stools at the Formica counter. Eight frayed black vinyl booths along the outer wall.

  The Sandy Hook Diner, fluorescent tubing overhead that glared like an eye impairment. In a smiling trance I’d rub, rub, rub the worn Formica and aluminum surfaces with a sponge as if charged with the holy duty of restoring to them their original lustre, beauty.

  Who did all this? Shining like a mirror?—Mr. Yardboro would exclaim. Then they would tell him who did it.

  The Sandy Hook Diner, careening through my sleep, dragging me beneath its wheels. God, was I excited! Hurrying to work breathless in the wind, arriving at 6:50 A.M. Eyes darting to see if, in the parking lot, Mr. Yardboro’s slightly battered Lincoln Continental was parked in its usual place. (Some mornings, Mr. Yardboro came in late. Some mornings, he didn’t come in at all.)

  I wondered if his autistic child was a son or a daughter. If a daughter, whether she showed obvious signs of mental deficiency. Whether what was strange and wrong in her shone in her eyes.

  Do not cry in contempt, The dumb bitch is in love with—him? That asshole? Without knowing it? Always I knew, from the time of the interview. One of my jokes, on myself. Providing plenty of laughs.

  Because business was slow in the Sandy Hook Diner my shifts were erratic. Another, older waitress had disappeared; I made no inquiries. I worked hard, harder. I smiled. I smiled at the upturned faces of customers, and I smiled at the departing backs of customers. I smiled fiercely as I wiped down the greasy grill, cleaned the Formica-topped surfaces until, almost, they shone. I fantasized that, if dismissed by Mr. Yardboro from the Sandy Hook Diner, I would have no choice but to wade out into the Atlantic Ocean and drown myself. I would have to choose a remote place and I would have to act by night. But the vision of my clumsy, sodden body on the beach amid rotting kelp and dead fish, picked at by seagulls, was a deterrent.

  10

  “SWEETHEART, more coffee!”

  One morning, Artie, who was a trucker-friend of Mr. Yardboro’s, whistled to get my attention, and afterward the man in the tweed suit who’d been sitting in a corner booth said severely, “They are rude! You should not have to tolerate it! Why do you tolerate it?” I stared in disbelief that he’d actually spoken to me. He was on his feet, preparing abruptly to leave, glaring down at me. I couldn’t think of a thing to say, not a word; all that came to me was an apology, but an apology for another person’s rudeness made no sense. So I said nothing. The man in the tweed suit wheezed in disgust, on his way out of the Sandy Hook Diner. Afterward I would remember how his puffy-pale face had flushed unevenly, like an attack of hives.

  Later that morning, when the diner was nearly empty, the man in the tweed suit returned. He was looking for a glove he’d left behind, he said. But we found no glove in the area of the booth in which he’d sat. Embarrassed, working his mouth in a complicated tic, he said, in a lowered voice, “I hope—I didn’t upset you, miss. It isn’t my business of course. You, and this environment.” We stared grimly at each other, like losers pushed together on a dance floor. I saw that he wasn’t so young after all—there were sharp indentations beneath his eyes, lines in his forehead. I was trying to think of an intelligent, conciliatory, or even witty reply, but though I was smiling automatically a sudden ringing in my ears drowned out my thoughts. As, in school, called upon by a teacher, or made to write a crucial exam, I’d be overcome by a kind of malicious static. The man in the tweed suit had obviously planned this speech, it was to be a gallant and noble speech, but he’d become self-conscious and was losing his confidence. Doggedly he continued, “It’s—ugly to witness. I realize you need the employment. The tips. For why else. Of course. You seem not to expect better.”

  I heard myself stammer, “But I like it here. I—I’m grateful.”

  “What is your age?”

  “My age? Twenty-one.”

  It seemed a shameful admission, suddenly. I wanted to scream at the bastard to leave me alone.

  He saw the misery in my eyes, and turned away. Cleared his throat with a tearing, ripping sound, and must have had to swallow a clot of phlegm. “I think—you were a student of mine, once? Years ago.”

  Mr. Cantry? He was?

  But he’d left the diner. I stared after him, stunned. Earlier, he’d left two crumpled dollar bills on the tabletop for me in his haste to escape, and a breakfast platter of eggs, sausage, and home fries only partly eaten. I’d pocketed the bills like a robot not knowing what they were. I’d eaten the sausage and most of the home fries not knowing what they were.

  11

  NEXT DAY, the man in the tweed suit stayed away from the Sandy Hook Diner, and the next. I was anxious and resentful watching for him each time someone his size pushed through the door. I was relieved when he didn’t show up.

  I tried to remember what had happened to Mr. Cantry nine years ago. I hadn’t liked him as a teacher—but I hadn’t liked most of my teachers, ever. There’d been rumors, wild tales. He’d quarreled with the school principal one day in the cafeteria. He’d slapped a boy. He’d been stopped for drunk driving and he’d resisted arrest and been beaten, handcuffed, taken to the police station, and booked. Or he’d had a breakdown in some public place—a doctor’s waiting room. A local grocery store. He’d started shouting, he’d burst into tears. Or had he gotten sick, had major surgery. He’d been hospitalized for a long time and when at last he was released, his job teaching seventh- and eighth-grade math was no longer waiting for him.

  A popular young woman
had subbed for him and was eventually hired to take his place. Within a few weeks Mr. Cantry had been totally forgotten even by the few students who’d admired him.

  IN THE DOORWAY of a dry cleaner’s, up the block from the Sandy Hook Diner, he stood out of the rain waiting for me. Impossible to believe he wasn’t waiting for me. Yet, clumsily, he expressed surprise at seeing me. He stepped quickly out onto the sidewalk, unfurling a large black umbrella. “Hello! A coincidence! But I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name?”

  He held the umbrella over me, gallantly. The rain came in feathery slices, thin as ocean spray. He was smiling eagerly, and already I despised myself for not running away. “Xavia.”

  “ ‘Zavv-ya’?”

  “It’s Romanian.”

  Xavia was not a name I’d ever heard of until that moment. Like static it had flown into my head.

  So we walked together. Blindly it seemed. I would have turned at the next corner on my way home but, Mr. Cantry beside me, talking in his strange halting voice, I forgot where I was going. Again he apologized for speaking as he had in the diner—“But I don’t believe that place is a healthy environment for a girl like you.” I said, “What kind of girl would it be healthy for, then?” but Mr. Cantry didn’t respond to the joke. He was speaking vehemently of “environment,” “health,” “decency,” “justice.” I couldn’t follow the thread of his remarks. As we stood at a corner waiting for a light to change—there was no traffic in either direction—he introduced himself as “Virgil Cantry” and put out his hand to shake mine. I had no choice but to take it—his hand was firm, fleshy. “Would it be permissible for me to accompany you home, Xavia?”

  I yearned to say, No! No it would not be permissible! but instead I said, in my bright waitressy voice, “Why not?”

  Loneliness is like starvation: you don’t realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  “I’M NO LONGER a teacher, I would describe myself as a private citizen now. A witness.” Mr. Cantry held the umbrella over me at a gallant distance, choosing to walk in the rain himself. His large oddly shaped head bobbed and weaved as he spoke; he was constantly shifting, shrugging his shoulders inside his trench coat. He seemed both excited in my presence and acutely nervous. As we walked, an awkward couple, Mr. Cantry a head taller than me, I tried to avoid knocking against his arm; my heart was beating quickly, with a kind of fainting, incredulous dread; yet I had to resist the impulse to snort with laughter, too. For wasn’t this a kind of date? A romantic encounter? I wondered what the two of us looked like, a couple walking along a near-deserted commercial street in Sandy Hook, New Jersey, in the rain. If it was the movies you wouldn’t have a clue how to respond without music—is the scene solemn, sad, touching, comical? “I was sick for a while,” Mr. Cantry said, “and in my sickness my ego was dissolved. I discovered that our historical existences are not our essence. I believe I’m free now of ego-contamination and distraction. It’s enough that I exist. For to exist is to witness. My astigmatism is so severe, ordinary glasses would be inadequate, so I must wear contact lenses, yet—it’s with clear eyes that I have learned to see.”

  I said, “I wear contact lenses, too. I hate them.”

  I smiled, it wasn’t the right response. But Mr. Cantry seemed hardly to be listening. He said, “You were one of my students, Xavia? I thought I recognized you weeks ago, in the diner, but I don’t recall the name—‘Xavia.’ I think I would recall such an exotic name.”

  “I wasn’t an exotic student. I didn’t do well in math.”

  “I remember you as an intelligent, serious student. But shy. Perhaps anxious. You asked for ‘extra credit’ assignments in homework and they were always diligently done.”

  I heard myself laugh harshly, in embarrassment. “That wasn’t me, Mr. Cantry.”

  “Please call me Virgil. Yes, surely it was you.”

  I resented it, that this man, a stranger, should claim to know more about me than I knew about myself.

  Because I hadn’t turned up the street to my apartment house, I was obliged now to improvise a route back in that direction. Mr. Cantry, earnestly speaking of his teaching years, his illness, and his convalescence and his “transmogrification” of ego, took no evident notice of where we were going. Like a blinded bull, he might be led by the lightest touch in any direction. He seemed not to mind or perhaps not to notice the rain, which was quite cold; he continued to hold the big black umbrella out over my head. I fantasized that I could have led this strange man anywhere—out to the Sandy Hook Pier, where, at this hour, teenage boys would be playing video games in a hangar-sized garishly lit arcade, or along the windswept, littered beach in the direction of scrubby Sandy Hook, at the far end of which was a white-painted lighthouse, a local monument, unused as a lighthouse for decades. It seemed strange to me, it made me uneasy, that this man who didn’t know me at all was so trusting.

  “You have moved away from your home, Xavia? Are you living alone now?”

  I yearned to say I prefer not to discuss my private life with you, thank you! but instead I said, in my bright waitressy voice, “Alone.”

  “I have never married,” Mr. Cantry said fastidiously. “It was never an occasion.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “No, no, no! Some natures, it isn’t for them to marry. To sire children, in any case.”

  “You can be married without having children, Mr. Cantry.”

  Mr. Cantry said vehemently, “What purpose is there of marriage, then? The marital bond is legalized, reinforced nature. It is a social embodiment of nature. To reproduce the species, to nurture the offspring. If there are no offspring, there need be no marriage.”

  I couldn’t quarrel with Mr. Cantry there. I wondered what we were talking about. At least, he wasn’t proposing marriage.

  Now we were on the narrower, darker street where I lived; it seemed that Mr. Cantry and I were blundering against each other more frequently. Several times he murmured, “Excuse me!” I was thinking sometime in eighth grade, around the time I’d begun to menstruate, my skin had started to go bad; it was possible that Mr. Cantry remembered me before the onslaught of the pimply infections. I could not seem to remember him at all now.

  It crossed my mind that I might lead Mr. Cantry to another apartment house and say good night to him there. Yet he appeared so oblivious of his surroundings, I reasoned he wouldn’t remember which house was mine. He walked with me up onto the porch of the house, out of the rain. He was panting from the few steps and his voice was strained. As if we’d been discussing the matter all along, he said, “So, you see, Xavia—I realize my opinion is unsolicited—I feel strongly that you should search for another job. A more civilized environment, yes?”

  “You could eat somewhere else, Mr. Cantry.”

  “That isn’t the point! You are the one who is being demeaned.”

  I yearned to say with a vulgar laugh, Fuck you! Who’s demeaned?

  I said, annoyed, “Look. I didn’t graduate from college, Mr. Cantry. I barely graduated from high school. I’m lucky to have any job at all. And I told you—I like the Sandy Hook Diner.”

  This was the most I’d uttered to another human being in weeks, maybe months. I felt brash and invigorated, as if I’d been running.

  Mr. Cantry said, sniffing, “Well, then. I stand corrected.”

  I’d disappointed him. He’d been mistaking me for an A-student and now he was learning otherwise.

  I thanked Mr. Cantry for his concern and said good night. He was backing away uncertainly, as if suddenly aware of our situation beneath a porch light, our aloneness together. I saw that he contemplated shaking my hand again and discreetly I hid both my hands behind me. He said, hesitantly, “Maybe if, another time, you wished it—we might have dinner together? Not at the diner.” It was an attempt at a joke but I failed to catch the joke, saying quickly, before I heard myself say yes, “Well. I don’t know. Maybe.”

  From inside the musty-smelling ve
stibule of the old house I observed my former math teacher carefully descend the porch steps and walk away in the rain. It was clear that he limped slightly, favoring his right leg. His shoulders distinctly sagged. On the porch, not seeming to know what he did, he’d shut up the umbrella as if preparing to come inside the house and now, out in the rain again, he’d forgotten to open it.

  THAT NIGHT, I had a rare dream. One of my lurid hurt-fantasies (as I called them: I’d had such fantasies since grade school). At the Sandy Hook Diner having to serve the male customers who were Mr. Yardboro’s friends though no one I exactly recognized. And Mr. Yardboro was calling me, whistling for me. I had to serve the men naked. A filmy strip of cloth like a curtain wrapped around me, coming loose. My breasts were exposed, I couldn’t conceal myself. My coarse-hairy groin. The men called waitress! here! the way you’d call a dog. But it was meant to be playful, they were just teasing. No one actually touched me. I had to come close to them to serve them their food, but no one touched me. They were eating pieces of meat, with their fingers. I saw bright blood smeared on their mouths and fingers. I saw that they were eating female parts. Breasts and genitals. Slices of pink-glistening meat, picked out of hairy skin-pouches the way you’d pick oysters out of their shells. The men laughed at the look on my face. They tossed coins at me, nickels and pennies, and I stooped to pick the coins up and my face heated with blood and I felt a strong sexual sensation like the pressure of a rubber balloon being blown larger and larger about to burst and I woke anxious and excited, my heart beating so rapidly it hurt, and cold, slick sweat covered my body inside my soiled flannel nightie and it was a long time before I got back to sleep. I didn’t dream about Mr. Cantry at all.