It’s been. One of those. Weeks. But more than those, usually, they’re not this bad – though, as Kendra, my best friend, told me, It Could Have Been Worse. Most notable of things not good is the notion that my girlfriend of one month apparently dropped off the face of the planet sometime Sunday evening.
If her parents were the law, our couple-ness was a felony. Is a felony. We communicated through secret email passageways, livejournals, work abductions during her break and twice, even lies about working and then an afternoon or evening of consequent debauchery. We were good kids, no alcoholsexdrugs. But her parents are Too Good Christians, inflexible and unhappy. Lesbian tendencies, dykatrism, and the High School Gay Making Machine were all things that they weren’t particularly interested in hearing alternate viewpoints on.
The last email I received from her was on Sunday evening. On Tuesday, I swung by her work with Kendra in tow, to see if she was there, how she was, if we could bum a free movie rental off her. All of her co-workers knowknew me, about us. They’re just honest, hardworking Open Minded Individuals. So I assumed they were joking when they told me she wasn’t working there any more. We left.
By Thursday, there was still no word. On the midnight cusp between Thursday night and Friday morning, my cell phone rang. It was Hailey, a drama friend up away at college, and a member of the Mandi Posse. She told me that Mandi had indeed quit, and nobody wasn’t sure why, but that the manager who went by "Jason" would be at the store tomorrow from 5pm until closing.
That night, I slept next to the throbbing pain of my wisdomteethgoners, and tossed and turned and dreamed of her in heroic rescues from the grasps of evil parental units, of big jokes, of all situations with outcomes of eventual "good." Everything that could have gone wrong went through my mind – and I refused to believe any of the bad ones. Maybe her father, who is dying of Alzheimer’s, took a turn for the worse, though that wouldn’t mean she’d have outright quit instead of taking a sick leave or somesuch. Maybe she was hit by a car walking home, but again, that would be a sick leave. Maybe her mother found her emails, though I was under the impression that her mother was Computer Incompetent, which means that if somebody did indeed hack, it was probably her sister, but what would she care? Maybe it was just a joke. A play. A game. Of course. It had to be.
All I planned to do was to go to her work and ask her manger whywhen she quit, and then I’d let the situation sit for a little bit before I did anything drastic, to keep it from getting worse. However, that morning, I was talking to my mother, and told her everything. She said that the one thing I should do was, at the next available opportunity, to go over and walk into Mandi’s house and take her away. I didn’t think I’d be able to abduct her, but I’d visit.
Kendra came with me, my best friend, the only person I’d really be comfortable seeing me in such a potentially vulnerable situation. The only person I’d really want to be there. When we got into my station wagon, the infamous familywagon with honest-to-goodness imitation wood siding, I had no idea what in god’s name I was going to do.
And everything after that is speckled with amnesia, though it may not be amnesia so much as a desire to remember it better than most things I experience.
Hailey had been mistaken; the Manager Jason wasn’t there. He evidently had taken the day off. Instead, we spoke with all of her co-workers, who slowly gathered round in their purple button-up Hollywood Video shirts. They were all there, and it felt like the end of a movie. Somebody died and nobody in the audience wants to cry next to their date. Sheldon watched me sadly with his ice blue eyes and said, "We loved Mandi. She was wonderful." No one knew quite why she had left, except that "they found out." I don’t remember what I said or did or how I acted, except that I was probably mumbling or speaking quickly, because they often asked me to repeat myself. Kendra stood behind me, in her polka-dotted black skirt, and we left, her skirt and my dykespike hair, both only partially enlightened.
Mandi’s house is very close to her work, and we drove past it the first time, looking to see if her mother’s van was out in the front. We had determined that if the van was there, we wouldn’t stop, but if it was absent, we would go up to knock on the door. It wasn’t there. We parked and got out of the car and I looked at Kendra and asked her what she thought I should do – would it make it worse? What if they just slammed the door in our face? What if they lied and told us she wasn’t home? What if?
"You should do it," she told me after a bit. "Something to show her that you care."
Bold moves. I’m no heroine, just a kid trying to get out of high school with a diploma and good friends and memories. Just a little girl raised in an upper-middle class white household. I’ve never had to do something like that before. Everything else I’ve done has been more or less given to me, guaranteed. Safe on known, pre-searched turf.
They had an American flag draped over the bench in the front. We knocked. Rang the doorbell. And again. Kendra petted the two cats. I stared through the peephole in the door, as if I would be able to see what was going on inside.
We could hear it. "Banana! I want a banana!" That was a younger sibling. Then the bouncing noise of a large exercise ball. "Bananas!" Again. And then somebody else, "Shh! Be quiet!" We weren’t supposed to know that they were at home. But Mandi was in there, and she knew who it was standing on her porch, and she probably knew my heart was beating somewhere in my throat. I looked at Kendra.
"What are you going to do?" She asked, after they still didn’t come to the door.
I smiled bitterly. "Come back at the same time tomorrow."
She nodded at me and we made our way to the car. It would have been better if they had at least opened the door only to slam it our face, I told her as I fumbled to put the keys in the ignition. I pulled it out of park and began to drive away as I caught a glimpse of black hair, not spiked like mine as it usually was, and bare feet out of long boyshorts. Coming through the door that should have opened earlier. "There she is," Kendra told me, "stop."
It was difficult. I had to think through every move. Put it in park. Crank on the emergency brake. Turn off the engine. By the time I managed to get out, they had already hugged.
This is where my mind later blurred, and I wondered if I had hugged her. I don’t remember doing it, but I must have.
It wasn’t the Mandi I had fallen in love with, this new person was a complete wreck. Her lips were small and dry and her hair, unstyled and blueblack and beautiful anyway, contrasted sharply against a bloodless-color face. A sick yellowpink I never want to see again.
She told me that they had found out, read everything. Livejournal, emails, handwritten love notes. That her mother had offered her the chance to become emancipated, but that she had "chickened out." That maybe she’d be able to write me tomorrow, that we could visit her if her father was home to supervise us, but that he wasn’t home right now so we’d better take off. I was essentially mute.
"How is it?"
"Not as bad as I thought it would be,” She said. And, like a prayer, she mumbled in reference to her 18th birthday, “88 days, 88 days."
"I’m here, Mandi, I have a car and a phone…" with magical transportational properties, communicative powers. I knew she knew what I meant. I was her girlfriend. It was my job to rescue her.
All she said was:
"I’ll call you when I turn eighteen."
And then she was gone.
We drove away, and Kendra commented on how strong Mandi was, on how calm I was acting when she would be screaming and hitting things and crying. All I could think of was how Mandi didn’t op to move out; I couldn’t very well force her to leave. She loves that fucked up family, all 6 other adopted children, some retarded and others socially inept, her Alzheimer’s-demented father, her homophobe-banshee mother. And then I thought about how I had just lost my Senior Ball date. It was all so stupid.
Kendra listened to me as I spat everything out that I couldn’t think of when Mandi had been standing right in front of me. “What Mandi did say was that we’d be able to visit, and write. I am not sure if she said this to keep us from coming back, if that’s why she said she’d call me when she turned eighteen. It also doesn’t make sense that her father would have to watch us, because he has Alzheimer’s, and that’s just plain silly. If by next Friday I hear absolutely nothing from her, I’m going back. And I’m going to keep going back.”
“That makes sense. I think you should.”
"And you waited three years for Phil, and Karen waited a year for AD, and Maris waited four years for Michael, and Mandi had already waited three and a half for me…"
That evening, at my home, Kendra and I came up with solutions, with codes. I once read a book that stated "lovers’ codes are impossible to break." Mandi and I may not have been lovers, but we had our codes. We sent an email, which explained that in the future, she should be prepared to look deeper into what we are writing, that nothing would be as nonsensical as it appeared. It took us almost an hour to compose in such a way that her parents would read it and not understand that we were proposing treason. In it, I asked if I could bring her books.
Books are dangerous. Books have letters and pages and ideas. Think of the things you could say with a book. Underlining letters, thin notes between pages. Plot references. Character manipulations. Everything Lives in a Book.
It was a good night to get tipsy for the first time. I was housesitting, and Kendra spent the night. We went to the store and bought pasta and cake mix and salad and fumbled for spare change at the cashier’s irritation. She had brought over a bottle of white wine, and as neither of us had ever really drunk before, the results were distinctly rewarding. "It’s like a lime green inflatable thing around your head and you shake your head and it goes away," she laughed. The table setting looked surprisingly sophisticated, with the pesto and salad and shining silverware on the nicely folded napkins, and we spoke of love while listening to techno music.
We plotted to make a livejournal account that could only be read by people who had the password. We decided on "Operation Disclosure." It would be the place where everybody could say what they wanted to Mandi without fear of it being censored.
"If you could go back and tell your middle school self anything, what would it be?" I asked, drunk and finally able to almost forget about the trouble with my girlfriend.
"Don’t pull your hair back like that. You look bald." We laughed. "You?"
"Honey, you’re gay." We laughed again. And I thought of her again. My Imprisoned, Far-Away Girlfriend.
We watched Fight Club, with Kendra’s drunken curly head on my shoulder, and about halfway through the cake had cooled so we went to put frosting on it. As we were putting on the frosting, I realized "It’s my fault she got fired."
"No!" She said, "Don’t be stupid. She was a Lesbian anyway.”
I got some plates out.
“Put those back,” she laughed, tipsily. “We’re going to eat it out of the … pan. Yes. The pan. Get forks.”
By the time that we finished the first film, the wine had worn off, for which I was relieved though she was not. I went to bed before we finished Far and Away, but I didn’t fall asleep. There was a big black hole with glowing bluepurple spike edges in my chest and I still couldn’t cry. It just hurt. I was in bed by 12:30, asleep by 2:30, and awake before 4:00. Kendra eventually came in and crawled inside the bed next to me, and I hoped that I didn’t keep her awake. My heart was beating too fast and too strong for me to sleep. And the bluepurple spikes hurt too much.
What had I done? What could I do? Why didn’t she just leave that house? What if?
Call me when she’s eighteen?
What if?
And so I wait. And wait.
And wait.
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