Page 8 of All These Beautiful Strangers
In second grade Miss Wilkes asked us to write about a superpower we wished we had. In my story there was a girl my age and she met a genie near the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park who offered to grant her one wish. The girl wished to be invisible and that wish came true.
The girl went wherever she pleased and did whatever she wanted. She walked right into the Central Park Zoo without paying. She rode the carousel and climbed the turrets of Belvedere Castle and for a while everything was wonderful. But then the girl grew tired of this and she returned home and tried to get back into her old routine, but nothing was the same. Her parents didn’t come to tuck her in at night because they didn’t know she was there. Her teacher never called on her in class. She sat with her friends at lunch but their conversation and games never included her. The girl grew lonely and sad.
She returned to the genie at the fountain, who was the only one who could still see her. She asked if she could make another wish. The genie solemnly shook his head and told her that that was impossible. Most kids never even got to make one wish; it was unthinkable for one girl to get to make two. The girl started to cry because she realized too late that being seen was more powerful than being invisible.
If I had been any other seven-year-old in the class, I’m sure Miss Wilkes would have thought I was precocious and given me a check-plus for creativity, but this was after the summer that my mother disappeared. My father had hired a private investigator to find her, and the private investigator had told us what had happened to my mother, or, at least, all that he could know. So, the long and short of it was that Miss Wilkes was not amused or pleased by my story, but concerned. She told my father, and my father made me see a therapist.
Her name was Dr. Malby, and she specialized in adolescents with especially traumatic pasts. One of the boys she treated was about my age, and he had seen his father, a stockbroker, kill himself with a handgun to the mouth over an investment that went south. He told me this in the waiting room while he played with a G.I. Joe action figure and I fiddled reluctantly with a puzzle at the kids’ table. Another, older girl who was sometimes there before me had bandages up and down her forearms. She never talked to me or played at the kids’ table. She always slouched in her chair and thumbed through magazines.
The walls of the inside of Dr. Malby’s office were cotton-candy pink. We sat on the floor around a large coffee table on a fluffy rug and played Jenga as she probed my inner psyche.
“You can say anything you want in here,” Dr. Malby said.
“Are you going to tell my father?” I asked.
She gingerly removed a wooden log from the bottom of the block structure and set it on top.
“We’re all here so you can start to feel better,” Dr. Malby said, which didn’t answer my question. “Is there something you want to say?” she asked. “Something that maybe you feel you can’t say out there?” She motioned to the cotton-candy-colored walls.
“Fuck,” I said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
It was what my uncle Teddy had said on the boat that summer when he had dropped his beer overboard while adjusting the jib, and I knew it wasn’t something I should repeat because Aunt Grier immediately said his name in that way that meant a lot more than just his name. It always amazed me how much Aunt Grier could say with just one word, or even just a look if she was feeling particularly economical. A stern glance could get Leo to wear his gray scratchy blazer to dinner; a raised eyebrow could silence my cousin Piper’s whine that I—and not she—had gotten to steer the boat. This time, Aunt Grier said, “Teddy,” but she meant, “Teddy-not-in-front-of-the-children.”
I didn’t know what the word “fuck” meant, exactly. At least, I didn’t know the literal meaning. I just knew how it made me feel when I said it. Like it encapsulated this anger and shame and loneliness that there was no other way to give voice to. Those things never sounded the way they felt inside. But “fuck” somehow captured it. It was teeth against lip, bone against flesh to start. It was round and whole in the middle. And it was harsh and clawing at the end.
“Does that make you feel better?” Dr. Malby asked.
I nodded because yes, actually, it did. And so Dr. Malby sat there patiently and let me say it again and again to the cotton-candy-colored walls of her office. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. I savored the word each time, the way my mouth felt when I formed it, how the hollows of my chest felt when I released it. It was like taking a breath of air when you’ve been holding your breath so long that your lungs are about to burst.
In my mailbox the morning after the night in the woods with the A’s was a note, hastily written on a scrap of paper:
Charlotte,
MUST see you. Meet me at 9 p.m. at Rosie’s Diner. Very important.
Hank
My heart sank a little when I realized it was not my first ticket from the A’s.
Hank? Who the hell was Hank? And why did he want to meet me in the local greasy spoon in Falls Church, the closest town to campus? My first thought was that it was some lovesick underclassman who had gotten up the nerve to arrange a face-to-face meeting and maybe was too embarrassed to do it on campus. There was something in the sloppiness of the handwriting that I couldn’t help but read as desperation.
Then, all at once, my confusion morphed into white-hot anger and panic. Shit. I knew who Hank was—and it wasn’t some dopey freshman. It was Uncle Hank, my mother’s oldest brother.
Which meant that he had been there, on campus, sometime in the last several hours. Was he still there—lingering, watching? I turned and glanced quickly over my shoulder at the rest of the mailroom, half expecting to see him standing there.
I hadn’t seen Uncle Hank in years—since I was ten, and my father issued the restraining order.
It had happened like this: Uncle Hank had picked me up from my elementary school one afternoon. I had been a bit surprised to see his rusted truck idling there in front of the sidewalk at the parent pickup spot in front of the school, but he had explained everything—how the nanny had gone home sick, and my sister was at a friend’s house, and my father would be late at work (my father was always late at work—he was president of the Calloway Group, which kept him very busy). Uncle Hank said he had come by to look after me and take me out for a bite to eat. So I said okay, and he held the passenger-side door of his truck open, and I slid in.
He took me to a cheap pizza parlor across the city that smelled like burned cheese, and he ordered me a giant plastic cup of soda. As I sat across the booth from him, sucking dumbly on my straw, he started to ask me about my mother.
No one besides Dr. Malby ever talked to me about my mother. But he wanted to know. What had that last month been like with her? Had she seemed different in any way? Who came and went at the house? How had things been between her and my father? And that night that she disappeared—what had I heard? What had I seen?
That was it. We talked. It felt good, actually, to talk about it, to talk about my mother with someone who had known her, too. To not keep it all inside like it was some dark, forbidden thing. For someone in my own family to want to know, to listen.
It was dark out when he drove me home and the truth was, I wasn’t scared or even aware that anything was wrong until we pulled up to the curb in front of my building, and I saw the police car parked there, its lights flashing red and blue moons that were orbiting the sidewalk. And that’s when I started to cry, panic welling up in my chest.
As soon as my uncle Hank stopped the truck, I unbuckled my seat belt and started pulling at the door handle, trying to open it, but it wouldn’t open because it was old and finicky and got stuck if you didn’t do it just right, and so I started to scream. And that’s what the police officers and my father saw when they came running out to the curb—me, in the front passenger seat of Uncle Hank’s truck, screaming and pounding the glass with my palms like some caged animal. Uncle Hank hurriedly got out and went around to try to open the door from the outside.
