Even then, I knew my role in the social hierarchy.
Six years later, not much has changed.
Leigh is gone, those boys are gone. But I’m still here, sitting on the carousel all alone, chasing down some girl that’s unreachable; she’s far out of reach as are most of my dreams.
Quinn
Esther is a great roommate. Most of the time. I’ve hardly ever seen her angry, except for the day I rearranged the foodstuff on her cabinet shelf. Then she got angry, really angry, and by that I mean she nearly flipped her lid.
I didn’t rearrange her foodstuff, per se. I was looking for something, dill weed to make a seasoning for my microwave popcorn. A little salt, a little sugar, a little garlic, a little dill weed, and presto! It was one of my many obsessions. Esther was at school, a night class for her occupational therapy thingie, and I was at home, settling in to watch some show on the TV.
Esther and I each have kitchen cabinets that are our own. The ones with the bowls and plates we share, but the ones with the foodstuff we do not. There’s mine, packed to capacity with junk food galore, and then there’s Esther’s, complete with one-off cooking and baking supplies: kelp noodles and basil seed, dill weed, peanut flour, garam masala, whatever the heck that is. And Frosted Flakes.
I made the popcorn. I could have settled on salt, I know, but knowing Esther had the ingredients for my special seasoning, I dug through her spices and noodles and whatnot for the dill weed.
I didn’t think I’d made a mess, but Esther sure did. I was on the sofa with my delish popcorn when she returned from class, the volume on the TV quiet so as not to disturb Mrs. Budny down below, old Mrs. Budny, who I imagined often stood in the middle of her own home, her dough-like head wrapped up in a babushka, her skin an anemic white, upthrusting a mop with shaking, old-lady hands, pounding the ceiling to shut up Esther and me.
But not that day. That day the TV was so quiet that I could hardly hear. Esther came home in a fine mood, one which disappeared quickly when she reached into her cabinet for the Frosted Flakes and then said to me, “Quinn,” her voice a tad bit Hannibal Lecter–like when she appeared in the living room and snapped off the TV. Hello, Clarice.
“Hey!” I griped. “I was watching that,” I said as she tossed the remote control to the mod plaid chair.
“Can you come here for a minute?” she asked, leaving the room without waiting for me to respond. And so I set my popcorn aside and followed her into the kitchen, where her cabinet door was ajar. It didn’t look like a mess to me. I could hardly tell a thing had been moved. The dill weed was right where it needed to be, between the cumin and the fennel seed. Alphabetical order.
“Did you touch my food?” she asked with a strange tremor to her voice that I’d never heard before.
And I said, “Just a little dill weed.” And, “I’m sorry, Esther,” when I saw how upset she’d suddenly become. It wasn’t like Esther to become upset, and so I was taken aback. “I’ll buy you more,” I promised as her face turned red, as red as a field of poppies, so that I thought smoke might come out of her ears like steam from a train engine. She was mad.
She marched to the open cabinet and said, “The dill weed goes here,” as she lifted and lowered the dill weed container into the exact same spot I’d left it. “And the peanut flour goes here,” she said, doing the very same thing with the bag of flour so that when she dropped it to the cabinet shelf, flour sprayed everywhere.
I hadn’t touched the flour. I thought to tell her that—to tell Esther I never touched the flour, not once, not one single time—but I saw now that she wasn’t in the mood for a rational discussion on peanut flour.
Then Esther said, “Now look what you’ve done. Look what you’ve done, Quinn. Look at the mess you made,” meaning the pinpricks of flour that dotted the countertops, and she tromped out of the room, leaving me to clean a mess she made in response to my bogus mess.
You live and learn, I told myself, and the next day I bought my own damn dill weed.
* * *
I return home from the coffee shop, walking down the worn hallway to my apartment. The carpeting is frayed and tattered, a henna color to mask the mud and dirt and other gunk we carry in on the soles of our shoes. The walls are scuffed. One of the corridor lightbulbs has burned out, making the walkway dim. It’s dreary. Not dirty or dangerous or any of those things that urban dwellings can sometimes be, but just dreary. Used. Overused. Like a tissue that no longer has any usable parts. The hallways need new paint, new carpeting, a little tender loving care.
Though if it wasn’t for the homeliness of the walk-up corridor, I wouldn’t quite appreciate the hominess of Esther’s and my space. Snug and comfy, cozy and warm.
As I slide my key in the keyhole and turn the door’s handle, there’s a part of me expecting to see Esther on the other side of the steel pane, making dinner in her favorite button-back sweater and a pair of jeans. The smells that greet me are delectable and divine. Either the TV is on—The Food Network—or the stereo, some kind of folksy acoustic thing emanating from the three-piece, overpriced speakers with Esther singing along, her legato and range even more impressive than the voice on the stereo that’s getting paid to sing.
If the radiator hasn’t kicked into high gear, Esther will greet me at the door with my timeworn fleece and a pair of slippers. Because that’s Esther. Saint Esther. The kind of roommate who greets me at the door, who makes me dinner, who would bring me coffee and bagels every single day of the week if I asked her to.
But Esther’s not there and I’m more than a bit discouraged to say the least.
And so, without Esther, I find my fleece myself. I find my slippers. I turn the stereo on.
I ravage the freezer for something to eat, settling on a frozen pizza jam-packed with pork fat and mechanically separated chicken beef. I’m not known for my healthy eating habits, but rather one who likes to indulge on fatty, greasy things—and ice cream. It’s an act of rebellion, naturally, a way to get back at my mother for years and years worth of Shake ’n Bake chicken, Hamburger Helper casserole and the unvarying mound of mixed frozen vegetables (lukewarm): the peas, the corn, the cut green beans. She’d always make me sit at the table until I’d finished my meal. Didn’t matter if I was eight or eighteen.
The first thing I did upon moving in with Esther: splurge at the grocery store on everything my mother never wanted me to eat. I asserted my independence; I took control. I claimed a kitchen cabinet and a freezer shelf as my own in Esther’s and my passé kitchen, loading them with potato chips and Oreo cookies, enough frozen pizzas to feed a football team.
Until, of course, Esther helped me see the error of my ways.
Esther is a good cook, the very best, the kind who can make things like cauliflower and asparagus taste good, or even better than good. She makes them taste delicious. She searches for recipes online; she follows cooking blogs. But me? I don’t cook. And Esther isn’t here to do it for me. So I find a baking sheet and slather it with cooking spray.
As my pizza cooks I wander into Esther’s bedroom. It’s dark as I go in, and so I flip on a table lamp that sits on the edge of her desk. The room comes to life, and there it is again, that fish—the Dalmatian Molly—pleading with me for food. I see it in its beady black eyes: Feed me. I sprinkle in a small handful of flakes and start pulling at desk and dresser drawers at random. While yesterday’s search was a simple reconnaissance mission, this one is the real deal. A strip search. A no-holds-barred search. It’s more intelligence gathering than a fishing expedition (no pun intended).
And as I pull and pluck papers at random from inside the drawers, I realize the fish and I have a little something in common: Esther has abandoned the both of us. She’s cast us aside and left us both for dead.
What I find is doodles. Restaurant menus. An essay on adaptive response, and another on dyspraxia. Jotti
ngs on kinesthesia with words like hand-eye coordination and body awareness inscribed on the lines of the notebook paper in Esther’s script. A greeting card from her great-aunt Lucille. The lyrics for a church hymn. Post-it notes with reminders like Pick up dry cleaning and Get milk. An arbitrary phone number. A box of contacts, colored contacts, that makes me stop dead in my tracks.
I stop and inspect the packaging. They’re blue, brilliant blue, as the box says. And I picture Esther’s cherubic face, one brown eye and one blue, a physical mark that proved she was special. Chosen.
Does that mean...? I wonder, and Could it be...?
Is Esther’s one blue eye an imposter?
No, I tell myself. No. It can’t be.
But maybe.
But there are other things I find, too. Things that leave me equally as confused. Handouts on grieving, the grieving process, the seven stages of grief. I try to convince myself that this has something to do with her getting her occupational therapy degree—if Esther was sad, wouldn’t I have known?—and that this isn’t real life. Not Esther’s life, anyway. Someone else’s life. But that belief only lasts so long. From the piles of paper a card falls to my lap, a monochromatic card with a monogram on the front, a name, address and phone number on the rear. It’s a business card for a doctor. Licensed Psychologist, it reads. I pick up that card and stare at it for a good three minutes, making sure it doesn’t read podiatrist, pulmonologist, pediatrician. Some other kind of doctor that starts with a p. But no. It says psychologist. Esther was sad. Esther is sad. She’s grieving, and I didn’t know a thing about it.
But why, I wonder, why is Esther sad?
And what else hasn’t she been telling me?
There’s more. Another document that I find in the pile of documents. A form, an official-looking form that reads State of Illinois across the top. In the circuit court of Cook County. Petition for name change.
It’s complete. Signed, dated and stamped. Esther is no longer Esther, but now Jane? It seems preposterous, imagining Esther as something as banal as a Jane. Something so ordinary for Esther, who isn’t in the least bit ordinary. If she had to change her name she should have gone for something along the lines of Portia, Cordelia, Astrid. That’s far more suiting to Esther than Jane.
But no. Esther is now Jane. Jane Girard.
I’m hit with a sudden flash from the past: Esther and I sitting on the apartment sofa, watching TV. It was three months ago, maybe four. She’d been somewhere for the day, which she was pretty tight-lipped and buttoned-up about; she wouldn’t tell me where she’d gone. And since she didn’t, my mind made up for lack of details, envisioning some unscrupulous man with a wife and kids meeting Esther at that shady hotel over on Ridge, the one that was still offering en suite bathrooms and color TV, as if this was the latest and greatest in hotel accommodations. It wasn’t like Esther to do such a thing, but it was fun in my mind to pretend. She didn’t want to talk about where she’d been, and muttered one-word responses to every darn question I asked: Yes and No and Fine.
She said two weird things then, two weird things that I remember. First, she said, “Have you ever tried to make something better, and ended up making everything worse?” Though when I asked her to explain, she wouldn’t elaborate. I told her yes. Story of my life, was what I said.
And she also asked this, out of nowhere, from beside me on the sofa, sad and contemplative. “If you could change your name to anything, what would you choose?”
I chose Belle. And then I went off on a rant on how I loved the name Belle and hated the name Quinn. What kind of name is Quinn, anyway? It’s a boy’s name is what it is. Or maybe a last name, I don’t know. Either way, it’s not a name for a girl. That’s what I said.
I never knew what Esther would choose—she didn’t tell me—but now I did. Jane. Esther chose the name Jane.
Esther had changed her name. Legally. She had stood in some courtroom before a judge and asked that her name be changed, and I didn’t know. How did I not know about this?
I also find a paper shredder plugged into an electrical outlet on the white wall. I yank off the top of the shredder and stare inside at the millions of ribbons of paper bits. It’s filled to the brim; I don’t think she could get one more sheet of paper in. How long would it take me to sort the ribbons of paper out and tape them back together again? Would it even be possible?
I return to the desk and find a bookmark, a coupon, a gift certificate and what looks like a passport photo, three passport photos tucked in a Walgreens sleeve, the fourth image missing, sheared off the page evenly with a pair of scissors. No passport, just the remaining photos, and I have to wonder who they belong to, Esther or Jane?
I also wonder where the passport is.
I search everywhere, but there’s no passport here.
If Esther changed her name to Jane and got a passport for Jane, she’d need other things changed to Jane, as well, such as a driver’s license and a social security card. Is Esther walking around someplace with a driver’s license that bears the name Jane Girard?
But then, when I’m about to give up hope of finding anything else in the drawers, I see another note, typed and signed, All my love, with the same E and the same V. All my love, EV. Esther Vaughan. Folded in thirds as the first note had been, and stuffed at the bottom of the bottom desk drawer.
My Dearest, I read as the oven timer hollers for me, the odor of burning pizza cheese threatening to ignite the entire building on fire.
I drop the note on the desktop and run.
Alex
There isn’t anything you can’t find on the internet these days, especially for a public figure like Dr. Giles. Thanks to sites like HealthGrades and ZocDoc.com I can easily access any and all reviews on the shrink. The first thing I discover is that he really does have a first name, something other than doctor. Joshua is his name. Dr. Joshua Giles.
For some reason that changes everything when I picture him as a helpless babe, in a mother’s arms, being given a name. Joshua.
He’s also thirty-four years old.
Married.
A father of two.
Graduate of Chicago’s Northwestern University, with above-average ratings in wait time and office cleanliness, ease of scheduling appointments. By the looks of HealthGrades and ZocDoc.com, people like him.
I spend the afternoon at the public library, reading the reviews on a computer I’ve reserved. Unlike the rest of the world, Pops and I don’t own a computer. This computer, a dated HP desktop, sits in a small terminal in the equally as dated library. The town library, a 1920s relic, is old. Though it’s expanded twice since the original seven-hundred-square-foot library was opened in 1925, it’s still small. The collections are lacking and out of date, a has-been of some other generation. Books are in short supply. And then there are the videocassettes, movies still available on VHS, which far surpass the number of DVDs.
Here at the computer terminal (I’m surprised we even have computers, rather than typewriters, word processors, the Roman abacus), there are no doors or walls and so I’m constantly peering over my shoulder to ensure I’m not being watched, that some looky-loo or nosey parker isn’t surveilling my internet search. Because that’s the kind of thing people around here do. I make a mental note to clear the search history before I leave, too, so some librarian doesn’t stop by later and see what I’ve been seeing, the glowing reviews for a Dr. Joshua Giles, PhD, that appear on the screen one after the next, after the next. Kind, say the reviews. Good listener. Heartwarming. Grounded. Easy to talk to.
He is the best!!! says one review, with an overkill of exclamation points that makes me question the reviewer’s mental health and state of mind.
As for Dr. Giles’s personal life, he’s married to a Molly Giles and has two kids, a four-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter, according to a blip in the local
paper. There’s no mention of their names. There are pictures of Dr. Giles—professional photos of him in a navy sport coat with a stock gray backdrop like every other doctor in the whole entire world has—but zilch for the rest of the family. His home was purchased about a year and a half ago for 650,000 smackeroos. Everything is there: his name, date of purchase, address, what he pays in property taxes. There’s no such thing as privacy anymore.
“Finding everything okay?” a passing librarian asks, and I jump quickly, minimizing the screen. The librarian is a relic from the 1920s herself, a gray-haired woman well past her prime. I tell her I am; I’m finding everything just fine. Except that I’m not, not really. I don’t even know what it is that I’m looking for, but I do know that I’m not finding it here. I guess deep down I was hoping for something scandalous and bad. Patients claiming he was a creep, a freak, a pervert, something along those lines. Citations from the American Psychological Association, code of conduct violations or just plain bad reviews. He missed appointments, he made his patients wait too long, he fell asleep in his chair midsession.
But as far as I can tell, people like him. The man’s history is squeaky clean.
I rise up out of my chair, the steel legs skating across the ugly maroon carpeting, getting tangled on a loose thread. I drape a coat over my hooded sweatshirt and prepare to leave. I double-check that I’ve closed all search engines, and then do a quick sweep of the search history to make sure there’s nothing there. There isn’t. It’s clean as a whistle.