Open Me Read online

  In the mirror my hair was full of static. Pimples had erupted under my chin. My breasts, shapeless in my soft old bra, sat under my shirt like a second, higher stomach. “Ugh,” I said, to hear a sound.

  As if in response, the outer door rattled, its hook clanging loudly in its socket. I froze and stared at the floor, an unremarkable stretch of white tile, and silently counted to sixty, trying to weight each number with a full second. Eventually the stranger gave up and creaked back down the hallway. With leaping steps I turned off the bathroom lights and ran back to my room, leaning back against the door after I closed it behind me.

  The walls swam. I wanted the sky to change from pale to dark, for permission to put on my nightie and go to sleep. But outside it was bright as noon.

  I went to one of the beds and tried to pull down the covers. It was so tightly made that cramming between the sheets was like putting on pantyhose. On the tiny bedside table a disk wrapped in gold foil lay on a tiny lace doily. Printed in black ink on the foil, surrounded by a braided ring, was the word LAKRIDS. Beneath, a tiny translation: (CANDY).

  I unwrapped it, revealing a shiny thin black coil, and bit. Salty licorice. Sour bark coated the inside of my mouth. I wanted to rinse with water, to brush my teeth again, but I wouldn’t go back out. What or who else might be waiting in the hall? I tried to picture who else might stay in such a place, but all I could imagine was a giant skulking raccoon, a monster-size version of the one that had taken over our garbage cans in the alley behind my house the year before to have babies.

  Yesterday I had seen another raccoon, on the tarmac at O’Hare as I waited for takeoff. Or was it today, the same day? I stared out at the planes arrayed at the gates, jet bridges like parasite tentacles penetrating their cylindrical bodies, my seatmate, a displeased-seeming man in a khaki sport coat, sighing heavily beside me. The sky did something obscene and orange as a prelude to sunset. Then there was a tiny movement in the corner of my eye, a person or vehicle I thought, but when I turned it was a fat little striped animal with a fluffy tail hustling near the open bay where they loaded the in-flight meals. It must have been terrified, surrounded by the oily smell of heavy fuel in that place of great sound and heat.

  Then we pushed back, taxied, lifted into the sky. Flew through an opaque, elongated night.

  I chewed, swallowed, wiped my tongue around the inside of my mouth, and closed my eyes. I didn’t know anything about Denmark yet. That the raccoon, which they call a washing-bear, does not even exist there.

  When I was little, Mama did all the laundry. Our clothes churned together in the big red washer and dryer in the mudroom, a small, narrow space directly below my bedroom with a floor of bright red tile that held the machines, a long folding table, bins and baskets for sorting clothes, and a matching red metal drying rack stowed behind the door. In the corner stood a tall white industrial plastic shelving unit on which Mama arrayed her jewel-toned detergents—grand bottles of the liquid kind, clear jars of capsules like candy from the future—and potions for soiled clothes: creamy purple and blue softeners, mild soaps for delicate fabrics, pails of powder. The purple plastic radio on the top shelf was always tuned to the news. In the long rectangular window above the machines, a view of the alley and our garage hung like a photograph.

  She did the wash on Sunday mornings, starting early, when I was still in bed. I woke to the machine’s soothing thrum, the water rushing through the pipes in the walls and ceiling. After breakfast, I liked to go into the mudroom and watch through the washer’s large porthole as our clothes were beaten into waves of soapy water. I would press my palm against the shuddering pane to feel the warmth through the thick concave glass.

  After the last load was done, Mama wiped down the machine with a silk handkerchief dabbed with lavender oil. She sprayed the inside of the dryer with a solution of vinegar and water, left it open for an hour to air out, and then ran it again with only five dryer sheets inside. In the summer, she set up the drying rack outside, and by afternoon the delicates—Mama’s and my own nicer dresses, Dad’s work shirts and ties, and everyone’s underwear—came back inside scented with sun and wind. In the winter, she unfolded the rack in the mudroom itself. Even when it was cold outside and the space doubled as a container for the shucking of coats and boots, it was spotless. On Sunday mornings, it filled with sunlight. The clothes that dried inside absorbed scents of lavender and vinegar and soap.

  I always thought Mama loved doing laundry. Why wouldn’t she, with her special ability to resurrect clothes? But one afternoon around my thirteenth birthday, she carried a red plastic basket of laundered, neatly folded clothes into my bedroom and put it down on my bed.

  “Clean!” she called.

  “Thanks, Mama,” I said without looking up from my book. The main character had just found her toy poodle in a puddle of blood. I knew she would soon have to either die or kill the murderer.

  “Roxana, put the book down.”

  I closed it around my index finger. She made me wait, removing her pink bandanna, carefully refolding it on my bed, and retying it over her hair. Mama had shown me how to do this many times, but bandannas always slipped off my head.

  “I need you to do your own laundry from now on, all right? You know how. You’ve seen me do it a million times. All right?” She blinked, which meant that the only wise answer was yes.

  Mama had always been insistent on self-sufficiency. She had issued warnings, in various bad moods over the years, of an impending reckoning that would result in me doing my own laundry, even learning to iron and sew. Such events could be avoided, I had believed, if I was a good enough girl. If I kept from making her mad, which I tried so hard to do.

  “Yes.”

  “Remember. I won’t tell you again, and I won’t do it for you if you forget.”

  I gave her a weak smile, trying not to cry. Mama wiped her hands against each other a few times and left. I threw my book across the room, hoping for a resounding boom, but my pitch fell short and it fluttered to the carpet.

  I had no idea how to do laundry. I had figured it was something I would learn when I went to college. I could identify the basic ingredients: clothes, detergent, dryer sheets. But what about the color-safe bleach, the fabric softener? The machine seemed to want them, with its many pockets and labeled ports, but I didn’t know where anything went. And yet somehow Mama expected me to know. Had implied with that methodical retying of her bandanna that my not knowing would anger, humiliate, and sadden her, all at once.

  The answers to these questions were delivered to me over the course of six weeks during which I destroyed all my favorite clothes. The machine’s brutal convulsions ripped out every seam of the velvet jacket I privately thought made me look like the picture of Eleanor of Aquitaine in my social studies textbook. My blue corduroys were reduced to doll size. My favorite soft gray T-shirt emerged from the dryer with bleach stains emanating from the neckline. Only a handful of already ill-fitting clothes remained unscathed, like some kind of cruel joke. When I could, I wore the ruined clothes around the house, hoping Mama would notice and help me. But she didn’t. And I was too afraid to ask.

  That was the year when girls at school started to care about clothes. Before, they had mostly targeted my personality, my small voice, the clumsiness that made me last pick for every team. Now what I wore mattered too. Over spring break, I begged Mama for a pair of the heavy-soled leather sandals that the dominant clique had decided were their trademark. When she finally gave in I wore them proudly the first day back from vacation, convinced the popular girls would reconsider their cruelty and desist. Instead, none of them ever wore their leather sandals again after that day. It took me a solid month to understand that they weren’t making fun of me, exactly; they were mocking each other for owning the same shoes as I did.

  Why didn’t they like me? I didn’t have a ready answer. For as long as I could remember I had had one friend, my best friend, Sylvie, the sole exception to the distaste for me that united the
others. But they liked Sylvie—who held them at a cool distance, neither accepting nor rejecting their friendship—quite a lot. They seemed to adore her as much as they delighted in ostracizing me.

  Of course, she was beautiful and smart, but I considered myself, not as wholly lacking these qualities, only possessing them in subtler—privately, in moments of high feeling, more refined—shades.

  One Tuesday after a long weekend in April about a month after the sandal incident, they all appeared at school wearing dark-wash boot-cut jeans and fatigue-green Tshirts with the word SUPPLY stamped across the front in militant white capitals. Had they all gone shopping together? The iconic outfit had even materialized in Sylvie’s closet. When I asked her how she found out about the store in the first place, she gave me a pitying look. “I read about it in the paper, Roxana,” she said, as if the Tribune was a place a sixth grader might reasonably seek fashion advice. Another thing I didn’t know.

  Even after the sandals I was hopeful that if I could look like the other girls they might see that I was like them. So often I heard them discussing something I liked too—a band, a television show, a book—and the illogic of my exclusion settled on me like a thundering headache. They wouldn’t talk to me for long enough to find out. I had to show them. If they could only see that I was part of their world, maybe I could enjoy some of its privileges: pool parties at the country club where all their parents belonged, ice-cream dates with the cute sandy-haired boys who wore basketball jerseys under open flannel button-downs, tiny butterfly hair clips they were always attaching to each other’s lithe braids.

  I was determined to get something from Supply but Mama wouldn’t take me. We only went shopping twice a year and only ever at discount department stores staffed by exhausted women in gray vests and at meticulously clean secondhand shops run by recovering addicts.

  “It’s not so much that I’m chasing deals, although of course that’s part of it,” Mama told me once as we drove to the rich suburb that held one of these thrift stores. “It’s more than that. It’s a way of telling them they can’t just do whatever they like with my money and my time. I’m in control.”

  Them: stores, companies, anyone who might wish to influence Mama to act against her best interest. She was proud of her resistance, took on a philosophical tone when discussing it, which she did every time we went shopping. Her proud statement of individuality always struck me as an elaborate way to say that no, we couldn’t go to the mall.

  I finally convinced Sylvie to take me to Supply the weekend before seventh grade ended.

  “I don’t understand,” Sylvie kept saying as her mom drove us through Creek Grove to the town center where the store had just opened between a hair salon and EarthLodge, a place I loved that sold high-powered magnets, astronaut ice cream, and pens that wrote underwater. “It’s just a store.”

  I couldn’t bear for Sylvie to know how badly I wanted the other girls to like me. She acted like she didn’t care what they thought of her. Maybe she didn’t. But she had never experienced anything other than their admiration.

  “I’m curious!” I said, stretching my face into what I hoped looked like relaxed interest. “To see it!”

  Sylvie gave me a dubious look. “‘Kay.”

  I hummed and whistled the whole way to the store, thirty-six dollars in my wallet, the entirety of my savings. Despite the risk of Sylvie finding out the broader mission behind our trip, I was excited. The Supply outfit was cool, and I was convinced I’d find something magical there. A navy jacket with epaulets like I’d always wanted or white shorts that would fit perfectly. Maybe both. If all the other girls could find something that looked so good on them, I could too.

  But when we got there, I saw it was just another store, with recessed fluorescent lights and an army of skinny blonde salesgirls who wanted to know, again and again, if we needed help with anything. Everything was too small and too expensive. Thirty-six dollars could buy nothing worthwhile, only a cheap plastic headband, a flimsy gray scarf, and three pink bobby pins clipped to a scrap of plastic labeled SUPPLY, which was what I bought. I was so disappointed. But I refused to give up on the idea that the store was magic—the idea that I could make the others see me. I wanted something to show for my efforts. Even the Supply shopping bag, a drawstring jute sack, was coveted at school. The popular girls carried their books in it. Sylvie’s mom’s face fell when she saw it in my hand.

  “Oh sweetie, I would have loved to buy you something. You should have told me,” she said, as if Mama would ever have allowed it.

  It was no secret that Sylvie’s family was richer than mine. Her mother was corporate counsel for the biggest pharmaceutical companies in Chicago, and her father owned factories in Morocco; Mama was a nurse, Dad a medical equipment salesman. We were just different, and the difference didn’t bother me. I loved going to Sylvie’s big house and fancy birthday parties. But Mama was suspicious of their easy generosity and always told me not to let Sylvie’s family spend too much on me—”too much” meaning basically anything at all. I could read these feelings on her face every time Sylvie’s parents invited me to go on vacations I wasn’t allowed to join, every time Sylvie gave me a brand-new pair of boots or dressy winter coat or some other extravagant gift.

  Behind her mother in the mirror Sylvie held a silky moss-green blouse to her shoulders. How pretty the color was against her hair and skin. It was a button-down, the kind I couldn’t wear because my breasts made the buttons gape. Fury at Sylvie flooded me. Her good taste, her small chest, her generous mom, and most of all her sense of restraint, picking out just one top when she knew full well her mom would buy her an entire closetful. “Nice,” I smiled.

  She grinned. “Show me what you got!”

  Leaving the bobby pins in the bag, I pulled out the headband and scarf and wrestled the tortoiseshell plastic onto my head. The ends pinched hard and the band hovered a half inch above my hair. I hadn’t tried it on before buying it. “How does it look?”

  Sylvie shrugged, obviously trying not to laugh, and turned back to her reflection. “It’s different,” she said.

  By the end of the car ride home the band had already given me a headache. The following week, the bobby pins disappeared into my hair, never to be seen again. The scarf didn’t last much longer. After trying and failing to incorporate it into my outfits in every way I could imagine—tying and twisting it around my neck in various knotty patterns; using it as a belt on a shapeless dress—the scarf evaporated in the washing machine, so cheaply made that under the pressure of soap and water it simply disappeared.

  “Roxana?”

  White stucco met white wall in a blank corner. Rain drummed on the roof. The windows leaked cool blue light. Where was I?

  “Roxana?” More knocking. “Roxana?”

  I freed myself from the sheets and stumbled to the door. “Coming!”

  Søren stood in the dark hallway, holding a small white bag and a paper cup with a plastic lid, beads of water on his black woolly hat and blue-gray slicker. Rain had stained his white sneakers gray.

  He pressed the cup into my hands. It was wonderfully warm. “You must eat. And stay awake for as long as possible. Otherwise the jet lag will be very bad.”

  We stood looking at each other. He took off his hat, rubbed his shaved head, and put it on again.

  “Is it the next day?” I asked.

  “No.” He shifted his weight from foot to foot. “It is the same day.”

  “The day I got here? Saturday?”

  He nodded once. “I did not want to let you rest too long. You will have a hard time on the trip to Roskilde tomorrow if you don’t sleep tonight. Drink this. It will wake you up a bit. May I come in?” Without waiting for an answer he slipped into the room and sat down on the twin bed I hadn’t slept in, handing me the paper bag. Inside was a thin sandwich of grainy brown bread filled with taupe paste and thin slices of cucumber.

  “Are you a vegetarian?” Søren asked.

  I took a bite.
It tasted like nothing I’d ever had, creamy and meaty with an undertaste of wet dog, full in my mouth like peanut butter. “No, why?”

  Søren smiled. “It is leverpostej. Pork liver pâté.”

  “Cool,” I said.

  “Very good!” He clapped. “A surprising American. Most spit it out.”

  “Thank you, Søren. You didn’t have to do that.”

  “I wanted to wake you and give you dinner, to make sure you did not have your night in the middle of the day. It is important to establish an eating schedule when you travel. To adjust to the new time zone.” He pulled his hat down over his ears, a sliver of his torso glimmering briefly underneath his jacket when he raised his arms, and he nodded at the empty paper bag. “This is real Danish food. Every child grows up on leverpostej.” He grinned.

  Like peanut butter, I thought again. “Do you eat it straight from the container with a spoon when you get home from school?”

  He looked aghast at the idea. “That would be terribly unsanitary.”

  I glanced at my hands. They were blurry. “Maybe I should go back to sleep,” I said.

  “We will go for a walk,” Søren pronounced. “A beer.”

  I was suddenly alert. “Give me a minute.”

  He opened the door and stepped back into the hall. I grabbed my jacket, calling over my shoulder. “Søren? What time is it?”

  “A few minutes after eight o’clock in the evening.”

  “It’s so bright outside!” I pushed back the curtains. Light coated the evenly spaced gray stones of the street, the smooth walls of the other buildings, the pearl sky.

  Søren’s dark clothes and pale skin came into focus in the hall, sharp as a photograph. He smiled. “In the north, summer days are very long.”