Not at all. She bent down, attached a blood pressure cuff around my upper arm, and began to inflate it.
Oh. That’s nice, I said. My tongue was stubborn and slow.
Well, you’re very lucky, she said as she slowly let the air out again, read the dial, and wrote down the results. From what I heard, that was a terrible accident you had. And here you are, pretty much all right. She tucked in a loose corner of my sheets … Not without a scratch, mind you, she went on. Because you cut your forehead, and you bruised your knee, and you broke your nose just a little. But I don’t know, that’s almost nothing for what you went through. She spoke to me as if she’d known me since I was a little girl, and wanted me to understand that my wounds were just a few more of life’s rough spots. For a while at least, she was my favorite person, and I was going to ask her to stay with me, but I was afraid she’d say no. She gave me pills for the pain and some magazines to read, and just before she left she smiled down on me and stroked my forehead. But the doctor who came to see me an hour or so later was less tender: he looked me over quickly and then told me that I was going to have to stay in the hospital for another day or two, just in case something else went wrong.
As soon as he was gone I got up from my bed and limped on over to the mirror above my sink, to stare at myself and see what I’d become; and what I saw was a woman, poor, pale, and tired, who looked the way I would have looked, if I’d been hurt. Lucky? I didn’t look very lucky. My hair was still dark blond, my forehead still high, my eyes hazel, my mouth wide, but I had two black eyes, and beneath a small strip of white tape I could see that my nose was forever bent, just a tiny bit: the bone took a slight turn at its bridge, lending my face an out-of-kilter aspect. My features were a little bit battered, like a girl who’s gotten around. What a landing. I turned to one side and then the other, I watched myself from the corner of my eye, and I was unnerved. My looks had never been perfect, but they were mine, after all, I was used to them, I’d counted on them, and now they were changed. I reached up to touch my cheekbone and the reflection reached up to touch hers, staring intently back at me with an expression that I didn’t recognize, somewhere between shock and fascination; my own face was a rebus, and I stood there for a while trying to solve it. In time it became too much for me and I turned away, but later that afternoon I went down to the drug-store in the lobby and bought a compact, which I took out a dozen times that evening when I thought no one was around, pretending nonetheless to check my makeup, when in fact I was studying my face, like some broken Narcissus perpetually gazing into a portable pond.
My sleep that night was occupied by a dull dream of a dark highway; the next day dissolved in an endless succession of even duller dramas on the television. All afternoon the doctors and nurses trespassed on me with needles and tubes, soaked my skin with cotton pads, pricked me, tapped me, touched me with their hands, and came to me with their questions. And what’s your address? the pink nurse asked gently. And how should we bill you? I didn’t know, and I wished she wouldn’t ask; I had no insurance, the total was more money than I would have to spare in a decade, and even the payments were equal to a month’s rent and then some.
Out my darkening window that evening the streetlights came on, first some, then others and others, spattering across the city as it got ready for the night; and money was passing from one pocket to another, cars were being started, kisses granted, drinks lifted, windows opened to invite the evening in. I was a stranger there, anxious and impatient in my hospital bed, with no other soul to keep me; and I was too far away from the town to touch it. I thought everything that would ever count as my past was already behind me in time. Of course I was wrong, but how was I supposed to know that?
Two mornings later the pink nurse put me in a wheelchair and pushed me to the front door of the hospital. I signed some papers, and I was discharged.
So I found myself in Sugartown. To the rest of America, the city was just someplace south, a name found in a high school history book, because it was near a battlefield from the War with Mexico, or the birthplace of some half-forgotten Plains hero. Its reputation barely reached beyond the surrounding counties; God knows it had never reached me. I knew roughly where it was, I knew that three or four hundred thousand people lived there, but from the vantage of my own annals it was just Faraway, an equal remove from the town in California where I was raised and my ex-husband in New York City, and as distant from them both as I could be without leaving the country entirely.
I’d already been everywhere else: for three years I’d been looking for another place to live, I tried cities the way some women try lovers, but I hadn’t found the right one yet. One town was too clean, and another was too big; I didn’t like the weather in another, it never poured down rain; I didn’t like the people in a fourth, they were all white giants, and they walked the streets with dumb looks posted on their faces, buying bland trash in tasteless stores. Still, I’d tried to fit in each place: I cut my hair and changed what I ate, I adopted accents, I tried to live by local poetry, memorizing legends and visiting famous graves. I was studying how to want things, where to want them, and who to be.
My name was Caroline Harrison, but the name didn’t mean anything yet. I’d carried my days from city to city in a bucket with a hole at the bottom, and nothing had collected but a few inches of dirty water. It was just same water, and I wasn’t getting anywhere. Oh, I’d learned a few things: I knew how to make rice and beans, and I could dance to almost any music; I could work a crossword puzzle, and I knew how to smile when I said No. I could tell a lie, and keep telling it until it was true. But that wasn’t anywhere near enough to grow old on.
It was the end of the century, and I was alone. All across the heavens the constellations were coming apart, all across the ground there were fences that no one could maintain. The crest of the millennium was approaching, but somehow it seemed to be a private affair; no one would talk about it, no one had my hopes; where I saw opportunity, if only for escape from disappointment, they saw nothing but a big bright party followed by another decade. But I was ambitious and I dreamed I was better: I wanted china skin and a reputation for the ages, I wanted a revolution in my kitchen, I wanted my decisions to double the world’s qualities, absolutely. So I was vainglorious: I was young. I had little enough sense of myself to be vain about, and the glories I was looking for weren’t small. Every night I stared out my window, waiting for the bandit to come down from the mountains, the light in the clock tower, listening for the sound of the trumpet; every day I went out with the word Sure waiting on my lips.
There was no turn: I’d kept trying, and I’d moved again. At last I’d settled in Dallas, where I went to work for the Welfare Board, signed up for a few classes at SMU, and watched everyone carefully. As far as they were concerned, I was just another white woman trying to get by in the City of Hate: they didn’t know, but I was preparing myself, one more time, for some glamorous struggle. But one more time it wasn’t like that: my hands became as pale and dry as the pile of papers on my desk; the students in my sections believed in original sin and drank Diet Dr Pepper with their boyfriends on weekends; I got in the habit of guessing what everyone was going to say before they said it, and I was right almost all the time; and I couldn’t eat; and the land was so flat you could see a man coming with a smile on his face from miles away. After about nine months I began to feel that familiar combination of annoyance and distress, a sense that I was on the wrong side of the island, lonely and digging for laughing treasure in empty sand. I was tired of the sensation of tears running down my cheeks, so I quit my job, packed my things, and started for the Gulf of Mexico, with no one to answer to, and years to go. I was in the hills of south-central Texas when my car left the road, throwing me and my things in a ditch outside of town.
Sugartown. The isolation of the place meant a lot to me, and so did its name. My arrival there had been an accident, but I didn’t really believe in accidents. So that was where I began, before anything else, O.K. I thought it might be the city known as Home-for-simple-hearts, and I decided to stay. The day after I was discharged from the hospital I rented a cheap studio apartment in a building called Four Roses, near a mall that had been converted from a train station long ago. A few days after that I went to find a job.
I put on a dress and I walked down to an employment agency in one of the office buildings in the center of town. By then my black eyes had