My roommate is somewhere around my mother’s age, though she’s such a rougher sort that I thought she was older at first. Her hair is deep-fried from too much peroxide, and her eyelashes are massacred with too much mascara. `On her pillaged pores, the glow reads as neither illness nor magic, but instead as gaudiness. It is as if she has smeared sparkly make-up on herself in a wild attempt to draw attention to the place where the glow is most pronounced: her round arms and her long breasts.
“You dick,” She called in the cross-hatched, nasal voice of a smoker, “Where was my Vicodin this morning, hmm? You bringing it now?”
“You haven’t been on Vicodin for weeks. And there’s someone I’d like you to meet.”
“Another one? God, the turnover for my roommates is worse than the turnover for MacDonald’s employees. How long you think this one will last?”
“Maxine, please.”
“What? I just asked you a question. No need get all huffy with me.”
Nurse gave me a look somewhere between panic and apology. “She grows on you,” He said.
Maxine laughed.
“Maxine, this is Claire. Claire, this is Maxine.”
Maxine looked me up and down, smacking her lips as if she was chewing something. It would not be long before I learned that she is always chewing something. If it’s not tobacco, then it’s gum, and if it’s not gum, then it’s her own lips.
“I like Max better,” She said at last.
Nurse rolled his eyes. “Don’t bother,” He said to me, “I’ve never heard her call anyone by their own name, let alone by whatever name they like better. Women are always ‘Doll’ and men are always ‘Dick’. You’ll get used to it.”
Maxine glared boldly at Nurse and said, “Thanks, Doll.”
Nurse just nodded and took his leave, shutting the door firmly in his wake. Maxine was watching me, her gaze unerring and unnerving.
“You know I didn’t mind it,” Maxine said, once we were alone. “Not at first, I mean. Not when it was just Willy. Served the sorry son-of-a-bitch right if you asked me. Don’t you agree?” She reached into her pocket and produced a lighter and a cigarette as long and skinny and pale as a supermodel.
“Yeah, fuck Willy,” I said loudly. I sat down on my bed, stood up, sat down again. I thought about opening my suitcase, which Nurse had already brought into the room earlier in the day. But I knew that as soon as I unpacked it, everything would become real. I wasn’t ready for that. I also wasn’t ready for what Maxine was about to tell me, but I didn’t know that at the time.
“And I knew my sister was never going to leave him,” Maxine went on, “Not even when she started talking about how bruises can sing and screams have colors if you look hard enough. She got good and crazy there after a while. Ain’t never seen nothing else like it, except on T.V. Poor little Ghost Girl. I bet if you took off all her clothes it would turn out she was invisible. No, never mind, I don’t even want to think about her naked. Seems wrong. She’s just a child. Don’t matter what dirty things she did with Will or how many hours she clocked down at the shop. She used to call him Prince William. Isn’t that repulsive? Prince Fucking William. Sounds like a derby horse or some shit, one of the second-rate ones with gimp haunches. Jesus! The things children come up with. I would have put maggots in his crown. I would have put wasps on that god damned faggot’s throne.”
I cringed. Couldn’t help it.
“What? Too much for you? Yeah, yeah. Watch your tongue, Maxine. Watch your mother-fucking dick-licking tongue. Damn fucking straight I will. I’ll mind my mouth. You don’t even know what kind of world you’re living in, do you, Doll? You’re just like her. You and Ghost Girl should have a tea party, you know that? You can invite every teddy bear you know.”
“Did Ghost Girl glow?”
The question left me before I had even realized it had formed. Maxine gave me a look that delivered more poison than the cigarette sizzling between her weather-marked fingers.
“That’s not why I called her that,” she said.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t--”
“Her name’s Elizabeth. She never went by Lizzy.”
I nodded. Maxine took a graceful drag, the way an aristocrat might smoke. Head back and so slow. Poise. For an instant I was able to overlook her excessive makeup, her tan-wrecked skin, the bright corner of some tattoo I couldn’t quite discern peaking out from the shoulder of her outlandish eighties-style blouse. She closed her eyes and arched her back and let out a low, almost carnal moan. I turned away. I thought, with a rush of illicit relief, that Maxine’s monologue was over.
“Elizabeth told me that Will had started speckling,” She said. The gravel had gone from her voice, and she spoke now in a silky, slippery tone. “I had to pretend to be scared. After she left I started laughing. And I kept laughing, and laughing-- so much laughter. It was like being at the theater. A very good show. I was so happy that I could have cried, if I ever cried. Which I don’t. You should know that about me, Doll. I don’t ever cry.”
There was a pause. I think she meant for me to fill it, but I declined. She opened one eye half-way and regarded me out of the corner of it. She looked like a cat pretending to be asleep, secretly watching its prey.
“I told Elizabeth not to touch him anymore, and that no matter what she couldn’t let him touch her either. It was my way of keeping him from laying a hand on her again. She wore bruises like other girls her age wear necklaces. Scared the shit out of me. But she wouldn’t hear a word against him. That girl.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I didn’t think it would work though, you know? I didn’t really think that just telling her so silly a thing as that if she touched him she might pick up the sickness-- that she might even die-- would stop her. But it did. Oh, it did! Can you imagine my relief? You would have cried.” Maxine turned to me and asked, “You do cry, don’t you?”
I swallowed. Said, “I cry.”
“Good. I thought so.” The cigarette wobbled a little in her hand. A cluster of sparks fell onto the bedspread. Maxine looked at them indifferently, and made no move to extinguish them. After a moment they winked out, as if they had fallen asleep.
That’s a soft way of saying as if they had died.
“But Doll, it didn’t end with Willy. Because Elizabeth kept good and clear of Prince Harming until the day he died. But then. Well. She cried. So long and so hard that it took the buzz right out of laughing, and I even said I’d go to the funeral with her. So we went. And there was the body in the open casket, glowing like another kind of ghost. Elizabeth was such a sad sight to see that day. I remember I got scared that her tears were going to flood her eyes right out of her face. Thought those pretty blue things were going to roll through the church on a wave, until someone put a toe down and crushed them. That didn’t happen, thank God. But what did happen was a million times worse. Do you know what happened?”
My throat was aching at this point. Maxine was breaking me apart. I shook my head.
“Say it out loud,” Maxine said. “I want you to ask me what happened to her.
“What happened?” My voice was brittle with held-back tears. In fact, it sounded an awful lot like Maxine’s smoker drawl.
Maxine snapped her fingers. Ash everywhere.
“She kissed him,” She said. When I said nothing, she added, “His corpse. I think even with tongue.”
I was appalled, but I folded my hands in my lap, squared my shoulders, tried not to let it show. “She wanted to say goodbye.”
Maxine vehemently shook her head. “No. She wanted to die. And she got her wish. The glow went right into her and ate her up from the inside out, not like most people where it starts with their skin. I think her pain was worse, too. But it went faster. Before we’d even accepted that she was sick at all, she was gone.”
Maxine flicked the cigarette out with her thumbnail. It got very quiet in our room. At length, she asked, “Now, doll, I’ve got a test for you. Just one question, nice and easy. How do you think I got sick?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sure you do. Think about it.” A pause. I tried to think of nothing at all. Then Maxine said: “I kissed her. No tongue. Just on her forehead. And you’re right, I just wanted to say good bye. I didn’t want to die.”
“You’re still here,” I said.
“For the time being. You on the other hand. I don’t figure you’ll last the week. Girls who live with me never do. Doctor told me once that she thinks that my ‘incessant rambling expedites the process.’ What do you think about that?”
“Well,” I said, “We’ll see.
